[awl130]

His conclusion is sound while yours is not. Korean is not a dialect of Chinese, which seems to be your implication. Neither is it a "branch" of a tree of which Chinese is the trunk. In linguistic terms it is called a "language isolate". In the past, linguists tended to group Korean and Japanese together; I believe largely for political reasons they have been separated--but that's another topic.

Korean uses many Chinese loan words (in the same way that English uses Greek loan words) but the sentence structure, pronunciation and grammar are totally different. You would not say English is a dialect or branch of Greek for the same reason.

I speak both Korean, Japanese and am currently studying Chinese. Korean does not sound like Mandarin at all because it is not a tonal language. It does sound similar to Mongolian and Manchurian. That is not surprising because the roots of Koreans (and probably their current language) come from the area north of Korea near Manchuria.

[samatman]

In fact, Greek and English, being both Indo-European languages, are more closely related than Korean and the various Chinese languages.

There is a controversial theory that Korean, Mongolian, and Machurian, are all a part of an Altaic superfamily — along with Japanese, Turkish, and a number of others. This was broadly accepted fifty years ago, and less so today.

[magicsmoke]

Given that we have writings from Indo-European speaking empires since 1000 BC that we can mine for phonological clues and trace evolutionary changes with while the languages of supposed Altaic only began to be written after 700 AD, it's not surprising that there's less evidence to be found and not enough for a hypothesis bold enough to link those disparate cultures together. The idea that Hindi, Persian, Latin, Russian, and English are linked together is already very surprising.

[lehi]

> It does sound similar to Mongolian and Manchurian.

Mongolian phonology doesn't sound like any other East Asian language I've heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkU9Zd0LQjg

[gibolt]

That is not my implication, just as humans are not evolved from gorillas. The likely share a common base.

That may have been 500, 1000, or more years ago and each continuously absorbed neighboring language features from trade or due to local social structures.

[James_Henry]

Korean gets about 60% of its vocabulary from Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Korean_vocabulary

This is why many of the words sound Chinese (and a particularly old version of Chinese).

[kazagistar]

Sure, but according to linguistic research still wrong. The ancestor seems so far back you might as well include english in your language family.