Korean belongs to the Koreanic language family. Korean does not belong to any prominent language families, but it is a family in its own. It doesn't really have any connections other than to Japanese and Chinese. It burrows some words from Chinese language and it is similar to Japanese in terms of letters and pronunciation. Korean consists of simple syllabic and vowel system similar to Japanese. In addition, grammatical system in Korean is similar to Japanese, but in terms of sound, Korean has its hangul script which has more "sounds" than Japanese. Although older Korean language did use Chinese characters (hanja), but in modern Korean language hanja is no longer found in most writings. If you have some background knowledge in Japanese, I'd say it would help to learn the grammatical system in Korean as you are able to still "think in Japanese", but other than that, it would be quite new to other language learners.
In terms of how languages change over time, I think vocabulary, sentence structure, and pronunciation changes the most. Vocabulary seems to be a rather faster change than the other two as borrowing words from other languages is a common practice nowadays. Sentence structure changes slower as we can see that in the English language. Old sentence structures are changed to new modern structures that we use today. Lastly, pronunciation changes slowly as well and even a new dialect can be formed over time.
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