Essay About Korean Language

The Korean language is steadily on the rise as a popular language to learn for second language learners. With the rise of Korean entertainment, Korea is being put on a global scale, and many people are starting to learn Korean with keen interest. Most people who are learning the language however come from very different language backgrounds and have a hard time adjusting to the Korean language. It is especially difficult for native English speakers who must adjust to a different alphabet and word order. This is difficult due to the significant differences between Korean and English, “particularly in sentence structure and morphology (word structure)”. (Shoebottom) Due to this, my goal for this essay is to try to highlight the differences between Korean and English. Specifically, I will focus on English and Korean word order, using syntactic trees to help illustrate the significant differences between the two languages. First, what is a syntactic tree? “Syntactic trees

English primarily follows the order of SVO (Subject Verb Object). “This means that the Subject comes before the Verb, which comes before the Object.” (Phillip) For example, “I ran home” or “She ate an apple”. Both sentences follow the basic SVO rule. In “I ran home”, the subject, “I” comes before the verb “ran” and the verb comes before the object “home”. As well as in “She ate the apple”. The subject “She” comes before the verb “ate” and the verb comes before the object “the apple”. Sentences can be (basically) broken up different parts, typically into Determiners, Specifiers, Nouns (Noun phrases or NP), Verbs (Verb phrases or VP) and as sentences getting longer and more complex, Adverbs (Adverb phrases or AP), Adjectives (Adjective phrases or AdjvP), and so on. For the purposes of this essay, I will be sticking to simple and easy sentences to break down, starting with the two