Korean
Above: written Korean (Source: CNN.com)
Korea is the language of both North and South Korea, which have a combined population of about 71 million. Korean is also spoken as a minority language in Japan and China, and pockets of Korean-speakers can be found throughout much of the United States.
Korea’s exact origins are uncertain. Grammatically, the language is most similar to Japanese, and Korean shares vocabulary with both Chinese and Japanese. Unlike Chinese or Japanese, Korean is written with an alphabet, known as Hangul. There are twenty-five letters in the Hangul alphabet; the letters are combined into “clusters” to make complete syllables.
Hangul is one of the most significant linguistic achievements in history. An initial version of Hangul, known as Hunmin chong-um, or, “correct sounds for common instruction” was invented by Korea’s King Sejong in 1446. At that time, the learned classes used Chinese characters for written communications, and most commoners were simply illiterate.
King Sejong’s goal was to create a writing system that was suited to Korean phonetics and easily accessible for common citizens. (The king recognized that Chinese characters, being foreign, were an awkward medium for the Korean language.)
Today, most written Korean texts consist entirely of a modified version of King Sejong’s Hangul. (Chinese characters are still used to a limited degree in South Korea, but this practice is rapidly fading out.) If you learn Korean, therefore, you will not have to learn the roughly five thousand characters needed for basic proficiency in Chinese, or the two thousand kanji needed to read a Japanese newspaper.
The above is not meant to imply that Korean is an easy language. In fact, Korean is one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. As noted above, it shares many grammatical characteristics with Japanese---another language noted for its difficult grammar. Korean verbs are placed at the ends of sentences. There are dual counting systems, and multiple levels of politeness. There are no tones in Korean, but most English speakers struggle before achieving a correct pronunciation. Moreover, we get few breaks on vocabulary; Korean shares no common roots with English.
Korean is a worthwhile challenge. South Korea is surging forward in a number of industries, including automobiles and machine tools. The nation is a major trading partner of the United States, Britain and Canada. Like Japanese firms in the 1980s and 1990s, Korean companies are now building plants and locating offices in the United States and elsewhere.
While North Korea is currently an insular Stalinist state, it will become a new market when the communist regime inevitably falls or reforms. Until that time, the North Korean threat makes Korean one of the languages most in demand in the national defense and intelligence sectors.
Just as Portuguese is overshadowed among the Romance languages by Spanish, French and Italian, Korean is typically neglected for other major languages in the East Asian sphere. Most language students with an interest in Asia veer toward Chinese or Japanese. Korean is therefore a good choice for the learner who wishes to acquire a scarce yet marketable skill.
