Korean is the native language of about 80 million people in North and South Korea and in expatriate communities across the world. It is a language whose classification is in dispute. Some linguists believe it exists in a family of its own; others place it in the Altaic language family and claim that it is related to Japanese. Korean has been heavily influenced by Chinese. A large proportion of Korean words were either coined in Korean using Chinese characters or borrowed directly.

The significant differences between Korean and English, particularly in sentence structure and morphology (word structure), make it hard for most Korean ESL students to acquire English at the same rate as, for example, their Dutch or Danish peers...

Korean is the native language of about 80 million people in North and South Korea and in expatriate communities across the world. It is a language whose classification is in dispute. Some linguists believe it exists in a family of its own; others place it in the Altaic language family and claim that it is related to Japanese. Korean has been heavily influenced by Chinese. A large proportion of Korean words were either coined in Korean using Chinese characters or borrowed directly.

The significant differences between Korean and English, particularly in sentence structure and morphology (word structure), make it hard for most Korean ESL students to acquire English at the same rate as, for example, their Dutch or Danish peers...