Korean is thought to belong to a variety of families. The Northern theory links Korean to Altaic languages of central Asia which includes Turkish and Mongolian. Another theory includes Uralic languages of Hungarian and Finnish as well as Japanese. This theoretical family is believed by most Korean and Western linguists to be the most likely. Another suggests an association with the Dravidian languages of southern India or Austronesian languages. This range of theories appears due to Korea's long history of contact with Japanese and Chinese languages in which it shares linguistic features with each language.
Before the creation of its modern writing system, Hangul, Korea used a series of Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Korean. However, due to the inability of Chinese characters to adequately produce Korean speech and the inaccessibility of the language except elites who studied, a more efficient and accessible phonetic system was made(Hangul). We still see China's influence in Korean in how it borrows half of its vocabulary derived from Chinese in Confucian classics. Today, Koreans write words derived from Chinese with Chinese characters. However, other than vocabulary, Korean is distinct in its sound and sentence structure from Chinese. Although Japan occupied Korea for a time period, few influences are existent in Korean.
In understanding Korea's great influence from Chinese, I see how Korean is a much more simple version of the Chinese phonetic system and the genius of its efficiency. Korean stands to be one of the easier languages to learn. However, just as in Chinese there are tones and sounds that are very hard to distinguish and reproduce for English speakers there are a few sounds in Korean that give some similar trouble for me.
Korean is a great example of the mixture and meeting of different languages(Chinese, Japanese, etc) to create one unique language. After the conquest or habitation of the Chinese and Japanese, whether forced to speak the certain language or exposed it frequently, Korean is created after being left alone from these countries being able to cultivate it on their own and being isolated by physical geographical barriers.
Comments
I also found the fact that Korean and Turkish might've came from the same language family fascinating! I didn't know Korean initially used Chinese characters, but I think it's an excellent example of language malleability of and how languages borrow and exchange words (or in this case characters) when needed. I always considered the incorporation of words into a language a clear example of colonialism or imperialism (like with the Siletz language), but now it seems like sometimes it happens naturally or by necessity, which gives me a new perspective on general language change.