Talk:Korean language

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[edit] should add korean peculiar, untranslatable things

such as mongshil mongshil (wool) doongshildoongshil (balloon) dongshil dongshil (floating)

dalsong dalsong (dew)

[edit] Citation for loanwords

i RE-INSTATED THE CITATION. Although I gave up waiting for the link to load, I found the cited material at [1]. More importantly, the citation is to a book. By going to the real world, one can find the cited material in this authoritative source. Perhaps the link needs to be fixed, but the citation is valid. Kdammers (talk) 01:50, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Incidentally I also had problems with those links in Firefox ... IE seemed fine. Or one can even just scroll down to page 12 in Google Books. cab (talk) 02:16, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Dubiousness of difficulty in studying Korean language

Total speakers of Korean language populations should be updated to 80-87 million of Korean speakers worldwide. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bostonkp (talk • contribs) 10:02, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

"Korean is regarded in the West as a difficult language to learn, an opinion that was expressed as early as 1880 by German businessman Ernst Oppert..."

I found this line laughably ridiculous. A 1880 German businessman finding it difficult does not speak for the majority of others learning this language, two centuries later. I've removed this portion entirely because of the a) lack of statistical credence; and b) relevance. I'm sure there are harder languages to learn and quantifying languages according to difficulty of study itself is a complex task. I've removed this portion entirely. 192.206.151.130 (talk) 16:21, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I wish you'd do the same for hardest language. --Kjoonlee 16:24, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
And the rest of the section which you gave no reason whatsoever for deleting? The difficulty of learning a language is obviously relative; the best we can do is give statistics from those who have done quantitative studies on learners of it, and the DLI are a widely-cited (if obviously Anglocentric) authority in this regard. cab (talk) 17:36, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Commonwealth of Independent States under "where spoken"?

According to the 2002 Russian census, there were only 60,888 speakers of Korean ([2] row 72) out of 148,556 people claiming Korean ethnicity ([3] row 86). That 60,888 is undoubtedly composed overwhelmingly of the 55,000 or so Sakhalin Koreans, and not Koryo-saram, who are by now five or six generations removed from their immigrant forebears who settled in the Russian Far East.

The trend of falling Korean-language proficiency among the Koryo-saram is well-documented. The last Soviet Union census in 1989, now two decades old, found 216,811 ethnic Koreans who claimed Korean as their "mother tongue" [4], a fall of 12% since 1970 [5]. In contrast, the number of ethnic Koreans claiming Russian as their mother tongue doubled over the same period. Basically what is happening here is that all the elderly folks who used to speak Korean with their own parents before the 1937 deportations are dying out and being replaced by ethnic Korean babies who grow up speaking solely in Russian. This decrease undoubtedly accelerated in the period 1989-2008 as compared to 1970-1989. German Kim predicted that the language might disappear entirely within 10-15 years, with the exception of South Korean expatriates and a few Koryo-saram who learn the language by socializing with them [6].

So by now, the total number of Korean speakers in the CIS (as opposed to people with great-grandmothers who spoke Korean 50 years ago) is probably less than in the Philippines or Canada, each of which have around a hundred thousand recent Korean immigrants and their second-generation children (see Korean Canadian and Koreans in the Philippines); unless anyone has a current source for the number of Korean speakers in the CIS, I'd suggest removing that entry. cab cab (talk) 05:07, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] refrences

i do not mean to offend anyone but this artical looks like it has lots of information but could also use more sources. about 5 more sources would do.hawkey131 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hawkey131 (talk • contribs) 21:57, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Intonation

Any information on intonation patterns?? 210.229.27.75 (talk) 23:43, 6 May 2008 (UTC)