I recently registered for a MOOC on learning Korean.
I was rather shocked by how little scaffolding there is in terms of basics when it is supposed to be for beginners. The first input is a video and the transcript is in Korean script. There had earlier been a list of Korean characters with very vague advice on their sounds but no practice of these sounds.
I find this very different from the careful scaffolding that is given for most Open University courses.
I have come across the following article about Koreans and the Korean language in Kazkhstan - Koreans in Uzbekistan are also mentioned in passing.
http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2016/32826/
I was aware of quite a large community of people of Korean origin in Tashkent as I had been there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For example, Korean style pickled cabbage was a significant feature in the markets.
The article is interesting but seems naive in some ways. Some of the comments made me feel uneasy because of the way the language seems to be seen as inferior.
There are interesting comments about language change. It discusses the way the Korean language has changed in these new contexts. According to the article, the variety of Korean derives from one that used to be spoken in the north of Korea. This reminded me of the way that American English has some things in common with older dialects of English. For example, "fall" was commonly used to mean "autumn" in Britain but has almost died out.
The changes seem to be seen negatively - the writer refers to languages "deteriorating" and to this variety as being "broken" and that there was "grammatical decay". However, she also refers to "grammatical aspects of the language changing", which could also be seen as an indication of vitality.
This is an interesting case of how languages evolve in different contexts and can be compared to the way that the English language has evolved in varying contexts..
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