You may already have your own reasons to learn Korean, for example, you may be a fan of K-Pop or Korean TV shows. Or maybe your best friend or significant other speaks Korean. Or maybe you are going to Korea for business or pleasure. Even if you have no specific reasons (yet!), you may just be curious about the language and culture of Korea. Whatever your reasons are, you are in the right place!
Korean is the official language in Korea, both in South and North, and it is the sixteenth most widely spoken language in the world, spoken by more than 78 million people. The number of Korean language learners has remarkably grown in the past several decades beyond the Korean peninsula and overseas Korean communities due partly to South Korea’s increasingly visible roles in world economy, technological innovations, and global popular culture (source).
As an English speaker, learning Korean might be challenging in a number of ways. First, Korean is not based on a Roman alphabet system but it has its own phonetic alphabet called 한글 (Hangul), which was invented by King Sejong and several scholars in the 15th century. In addition, to speak Korean properly, you also have to learn many other linguistic and cultural factors, such as several particles or function words indicating grammatical relations and multiple layers of speech acts by using proper honorific and polite forms of the language, depending on your relation to your interlocutor(s).
However, compared to many other languages with huge variation of their dialectal forms, there is little dialectal variation of the Korean language. Thus, when you learn standard Korean, you will be able to understand and communicate with anyone who speaks the language without much difficulty.
Visit our Living Language Korean to find our more about what we offer, or visit the Korean Language Lab and take Korean for a test drive!
