In all honesty, I don't think knowing the origins of a language is very helpful in learning it. But I do see that it slightly helps in retaining information. For example, certain English words are very closely related to certain words in another language. These words sometimes are pronounced similarly and often times mean the same thing. Therefore it helps people associate the word with the English equivalent quickly. Learning the origins of a language can help someone determine languages that are similar to it. This is especially true for the English language. People can trace the language to Latin roots. Other languages that sprouted from Latin are French and Spanish. And so, it sort of explains why some words in the English language are derived from Spanish and French.
For Korean, the Chinese language is a big influence in the way that words are created. Today Korean words are a combination of chinese and hangul characters. Half of the vocabulary in Korean is derived from China. The pronunciation of these words (korean and chinese) can easily be used to identify how closely related these 2 languages are in Korean.
Though I assume that it was Mandarin that played a huge part in influencing the Korean language, I can find a few similarities with my first language, Cantonese, and Korean. For example, for the "eo" sound, I realized that it sounds very similar to the first sound made when I say "to poop" in Cantonese. And so based on this, in order to pronounce the "eo" sound, I draw on my Cantonese experiences.
The origins of Korean are still being debated today. But there are 4 hypotheses of where Korean language came from. The first is that Korean is a version of old Japanese. The second is Japanese is a version of Old Korean. Koreans is related to the Austronesian language family is the third hypothesis. Finally the last one is that Korean belongs the Altaic language family. This last hypothesis is more commonly accepted among experts since there aren't archeological and linguistic evidence to support the other three hypotheses.
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