Korea is located to the west of Japan, and it shares a borderwith the eastern part of China.Originally, Korea was one country, but the end of the KoreanWar in 1953 resulted in the two sides separating into NorthKorea and South Korea. "Why?" To put it simply, North Koreaand South Korea had some serious disagreements that led tothe Korean War starting in the first place.Both North Koreans and South Koreans speak the sameKorean language, but decades of being divided from each other caused separate dialects to emerge, and the way eachcountry spoke the same language began to become moredifferent. For comparison, you can think of North Koreanspeech to South Korean speech as being what British English isto American English; people from both countries canunderstand each other fine, but have their own distinctdifferences in pronunciation, and vocabulary.For this book (and like most other Korean language books),we will be learning the Korean language as spoken in SouthKorea. But before we dive into Korean, let’s start by learning alittle bit about the country of South Korea.•Full name: hangul shortened to hangul. population 50 million. current capital: seoul. language: korean - of course! Korea shares a lot of its history with its neighbor, China. Alarge portion of the Korean vocabulary originally came fromChinese as well, although the sounds of these words werechanged as they were brought into Korea. Still, although Koreahas adopted much of its vocabulary from Chinese, and someof its grammar from Japanese, it is unrelated to eitherlanguages; Korean is completely unique from any otherlanguage. This makes it even more interesting.We’ll be learning to speak Korean through this book, as wellas read and write it. If you can’t yet read or write Korean, no worries! We’ll be covering everything about the writtenlanguage in the next few sections.Approximately 80 million people speak Korean nativelyworldwide. Including non-native speakers, and people currentlylearning to speak Korean (such as yourself), that number is much larger.