In what order should I learn/study Korean?
Korean, South Korean-hangugeo; North Korean: chosŏnmal, is an East Asian language spoken by about 77 million people and 5.6 million consider Korean as a Heritage Language. It is the official and national language of both Koreas: North Korea and South Korea, with different standardized official forms used in each country. It is a recognised minority language in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of Jilin Province, China. It is also spoken in parts of Sakhalin, Russia and Central Asia. The English word “Korean” is derived from Goryeo, which is thought to be the first Korean dynasty known to Western nations. Korean people in the former USSR refer to themselves as Koryo-saram and/or Koryo-in (literally, “Koryo/Goryeo person(s)”), and call the language Koryo-mal. Of the 3000 languages in use currently, Korean is known to be the 13th most commonly used language. Languages that don’t have their own alphabet and characters have known to have merged in another or vanished over time.
Historical and modern linguists classify Korean as a language isolate; though it is commonly included by proponents of the Altaic family and, it does have a few extinct relatives, which together with Korean itself and the Jeju language (spoken in the Jeju Province and considered somewhat distinct) form the Koreanic language family. Korean presence or influence is strongly found in the Khitan language (different from Mongolian or Tungusic languages in vocabulary). Lesser-known Dravido-Korean languages theory, suggests Korean relationship with Dravidian languages in India. Some of the common features in the Korean and Dravidian languages are similar vocabulary, being agglutinative, following the SOV order; nominals and adjectives following the same syntax, postpositional particles, anàd modifiers preceding modified words by default in both languages! Korean has also been disputed to be related to Japanese due to some overlap in vocabulary and similar grammatical features that have been elaborated upon by few researchers. Korean definitely has similarity to Chinese restricted to the script only! That being said, the linguistic homeland of Korean is suggested to be somewhere in Manchuria.
Modern Korean is understood to have descended from the Middle Korean, that emerged from the Old Korean, which itself, culminated from the Proto-Koreanic language, that is suggested to have its linguistic homeland somewhere in Manchuria. Whitman (2012) suggests that the Proto-Koreans, who were present in northern Korea, expanded into the southern part of the Korean Peninsula at around 300 BC and coexisted with the descendants of the Japonic Mumun cultivators (or assimilated them). Both had an influence on each other and a later founder effect diminished the internal variety of both language families. Chinese characters arrived in Korea with Buddhism during the Proto-Three Kingdoms era (1st century BC) and were adapted for Korean that came to be known as Hanja, and remained as the main script for writing Korean for over a millennium alongside various phonetic scripts that were later invented such as Idu, Gugyeol and Hyangchal. The majority of the population remained illiterate, as Hanja remained reserved for reading and writing by the privileged elites – the nobles!
It’s not very clear if Hangul was designed as a system to read and understand Hanja or to replace it completely. But, King Sejong the Great, of the 15th century, personally developed an alphabetic featural writing system, (Hun Min Joeong Um meaning correct sounds to educate the people- known today as Hangul) consisting of 28 basic characters, as he strongly believed that restricted use of Hanja, had resulted due to inadequacy to write Korean. Today only 24 are in use with 14 consonants and 10 vowels.
