Learning to speak the Korean Language

It really is true that you can only really learn a foreign language by hearing it spoken by other people. Audio is the most effective language-learning program to use. Language learning with an audio CD or with mp3 disks allow you to understand the language as a child would understand it. When you were learning English, could you speak before you knew how to conjugate verbs? Of course you could not. That same learning process is what audio language learning replicates. Listening to audio language CDS in your car while you are commuting or driving anywhere, or listening with your iPod or mp3 player, audio language learning is the best way to learn a foreign language. Buy your language learning online

About the Korean Language

Korean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers. It was formerly written using Hanja, borrowed Chinese characters pronounced in the Korean way. In the 15th century a national writing system was developed by Sejong the Great, currently called Hangul.

The genealogical classification of the Korean language is debated. Some linguists place it in the Altaic language family, while others consider it to be a language isolate. Some believe it to be distantly related to Japanese. Like Japanese it is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. The core of the Korean vocabulary is made up of native Korean words. Like Japanese and Vietnamese, a significant proportion of the vocabulary, especially words that denote abstract ideas, are Sino-Korean words, either

* directly borrowed from Written Chinese, or
* coined in Japan or Korea using Chinese characters,

in a similar way European languages borrow from Latin and Greek.

The exact proportion of Sino-Korean vocabulary is a matter of debate. Sohn (2001) stated 50-60%. However, Jeong Jae-do, one of the compilers of the dictionary Urimal Kun Sajeon, asserts that the proportion is not so high. He points out that Korean dictionaries compiled during the period of Japanese rule include many unused Sino-Korean words. In his estimation, the proportion of native Korean vocabulary in the Korean language might be as high as 70%.

To a much lesser extent, words have also occasionally been borrowed from Mongolian, Sanskrit, and other languages. Conversely, the Korean language itself has also contributed some loanwords to other languages, most notably the Tsushima dialect of Japanese.

The vast majority of loanwords other than Sino-Korean come from modern times, 90% of which are from English.Many words have also been borrowed from Japanese and Western languages such as German (areubaiteu "part-time job", allereugi "allergy", "gibsu" "plaster cast used for broken bones"). Some Western words were borrowed indirectly via Japanese, taking a Japanese sound pattern, for example "dozen" > ダース dāsu > 다스 daseu. Most indirect Western borrowings are now written according to current Hangulization rules for the respective Western language, as if borrowed directly. There are a few more complicated borrowings such as "German(y)" (see Names for Germany), the first part of whose endonym the Japanese approximated using the kanji 獨逸 doitsu that were then accepted into the Korean language by their Sino-Korean pronunciation: 獨 dok + 逸 il = Dogil. In South Korean official use, a number of other Sino-Korean country names have been replaced with phonetically oriented Hangulizations of the countries' endonyms or English names.

The classification of the modern Korean language is uncertain, and due to the lack of any one generally accepted theory, a cautious classification will describe it as a language isolate.

On the other hand, since the publication of the article of Ramstedt in 1928, some linguists support the hypothesis that Korean can be classified as an Altaic language or as a relative of proto-Altaic. Korean is similar to the Altaic languages in that they both lack certain grammatical elements, including articles, fusional morphology and relative pronouns. However, linguists agree today on the fact that typological resemblances cannot be used to prove genetic relatedness of languages as these features are typologically connected and easily borrowed. Such factors of typological divergence as Middle Mongolian's exhibition of gender agreement can be used to argue that a genetic relationship is unlikely.

The hypothesis that Korean might be related to Japanese has had some more supporters due to some considerable overlap in vocabulary and similar grammatical features that have been elaborated upon by such researchers as Samuel E. Martin and Roy Andrew Miller. Sergei Starostin (1991) found about 25% of potential cognates in the Japanese-Korean 100-word Swadesh list, which - if true - would place these two languages closer together than other possible members of the Altaic family.

Other linguists, most notably Alexander Vovin, argue, however, that the similarities are not due to any genetic relationship, but rather to a sprachbund effect and heavy borrowing especially from Korean into Western Old Japanese.A good example might be Middle Korean sàm < Proto-Korean asam ‘hemp’ and Japanese asa ‘hemp’. This word seems to be cognate, but while it is well-attested in Western Old Japanese and Northern Ryūkyū, in Eastern Old Japanese it only occurs in compounds, and it is only present in three subdialects of the South-Ryūkyūan dialect group. Then, the doublet wo ‘hemp’ is attested in Western Old Japanese and Southern Ryūkyū. It is thus plausible to assume a borrowed term. See East Asian languages for morphological features shared among languages of the East Asian sprachbund, and Classification of Japanese for further details on the discussion of a possible relationship.

Though Korean and Chinese belong to different language families, Korean has borrowed heavily from Chinese, using thousands of Chinese words; see #Vocabulary below.

North Korean vocabulary shows a tendency to prefer native Korean over Sino-Korean or foreign borrowings, especially with recent political objectives aimed at eliminating foreign (mostly Chinese) influences on the Korean language in the North. By contrast, South Korean may have several Sino-Korean or foreign borrowings which tend to be absent in North Korean.

The United States' Defense Language Institute classifies Korean alongside Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese as a Category IV language, meaning that 63 weeks of instruction (as compared to just 25 weeks for French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian) are required to bring an English-speaking student to a limited working level of proficiency in which he or she has "sufficient capability to meet routine social demands and limited job requirements" and "can deal with concrete topics in past, present, and future tense." As a result, the study of the Korean language in the United States is dominated by Korean American heritage language students; they are estimated to form over 80% of all students of the language at non-military universities.

However, Korean is considerably easier for speakers of certain other languages, such as Japanese; in Japan, it is more widely studied by non-heritage learners. The Korean Language Proficiency Test, an examination aimed at assessing non-native speakers' competence in Korean, was instituted in 1997; 17,000 people applied for the 2005 sitting of the examination.

We sell AudioBooks online, Talking Books, Books on Audio - CD Tape and mp3 formats. Learn to speak a language. AudioBook learning. Unabridged Children's Audiobooks and Fiction for Children