it is a very phonetic language also additional language system as janpanese.if u know his basical rules of pronunciation. u can read it even u dont understand them.

Sorry ,i don't know

Dear Beth, Hello again. Yes, it is very phonetic language, we can say. But we still do have some rules for that as well, but it's not that complicated because it's usually all about 'the rule of economic pronounciation' which means pronounce the language with using the minimum of the vocal organ. So sometimes it doesn't seem sounds are same the way it looks like. But I still would say it is a bit different from English thou. Because English words accept so many other kinds of language roots, such as German, French, Italian even Hebrew, Latin as well. So they prefer to follows their original pronounciation. Korean is a bit different. If you know the rules of pronounciation, it could be easier to speak out. I may need to let you know about this link. It could be difficult to understand but give it a shot. It's worth. http://www.hangeul.or.kr/board/view.php?id=cm04&no=141 Whenever you need to have explanation, just talk to me or make a question here. We all will help you with pleasure. Hope it could help you out. Thanks for reading. :) See you around.

I think that what do you mean by phonetic language is whether you can read letters based on the sounds of phonetic mapping directly. So, it depends on a writing system used in the language. Hangul, the writing system of Korean, is phoneme-based though there are some variations. So, reading and writing is easy although you may not understand meaning.

Sorry,I don't konw about Korea.