Hello! I am an English language teacher in South Korea. I spend my time teaching and learning languages - mainly studying Korean these days (안녕하세요?), but I've dabbled in many languages over the years. Recently I've been considering moving to China next year to study Mandarin. I've also been getting into programming lately, though only doing really basic stuff with Python so far.
I like this guy! It's a nice crash course on linguistics and he also has some other cool stuff ranging from fun facts to random how-to videos. Plus he has that British accent so you know you can trust him ;)
Korean is such an interesting language... My limited exposure impresses me enough to claim it the greatest, smartest spoken language yet made.
How do you figure it is the "greatest" or "smartest"? The writing system is probably the most logical and phonetically accurate in the world if that's what you mean, as far as the language itself goes it can be terribly vague and confusing at times and bogged down with hierarchical honorifics. For example: The subject is usually dropped form the sentence, so "가요" ("Ga-yo" meaning "go") could be interpreted as "I go," "You go," "He goes," etc. depending on the context, and "가다" (Ga-da) "가" (Ga), "가요" (Ga-yo), "갑니다" (Gam-ni-da) all have equivalent meanings ("Go") but conjugated according to social hierarchy and context (ie. if the listener older, younger, your boss, your employee, etc.) It's definitely a very different language than English and it's challenging to learn, and it starts making sense once you've studied enough, but I would hesitate to claim any language is "better" or "smarter" than any others.
Perhaps I was too impassioned in my argument. It is indeed the logical/phonetical construction that impresses me so much. Again, my exposure is limited so I cannot nitpick on the downsides of it. I just like it a lot: It seems like a simple, powerful language that appeals to me.
Are you a native Korean or are you doing a TEFL program?