There is a consensus among linguists that Korean is a member of the Altaic family of languages, which originated in northern Asia and includes the Mongol, Turkic, Finnish, Hungarian, and Tungusic (Manchu) languages.
Korean was originally written using hanja (Chinese characters), but now it is written in Hangul (Korean alphabet). Although Korean and Chinese are not related in terms of grammatical structure, more than 50 percent of all Korean vocabulary is Sino-Korean i.e. derived from Chinese loanwords. Just to give an idea, there’s an idiom in Korean that goes 공자 앞에서 문자 쓴다 which literally translates to writing hanja in from of Confucius (a Chinese philosopher), and it is used to refer to someone who is arrogant enough to try and teach an expert how to deal with their area of expertise.
Korea and Japan also have very similar grammatical structures, and this could’ve been due to the imperial Japanese rule over Korea. Just to give an idea, the honorific term 각하 (gakha) is reserved for high-ranking government officials, including the president; it is equivalent to His Excellency. This honorific is no longer used in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) nowadays as it serves as an unpleasant reminder of the Japanese rule.
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