The World Cup is approaching rapidly. Jamie Trecker at Fox Sports has an excellent rundown of the (South) Korean national team. Well, excellent if one only looks at Mr. Trecker's soccer analysis, because his linguistics skills (for example) appear to be a little rusty.

Take the very language of Korea: it is unique in Asia in that it is NOT ideogrammatically based as Chinese and Japanese are; the hangul (written) alphabet has 24 characters and the spoken (called urimal or gugeo) is what linguists call a "language isolate," meaning that is bears no roots to any other known spoken language on the planet (in comparison, the Romance languages -- of which the six most prominent are Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan -- are rooted in Latin).

No, Mr. Trecker. Korean is in the Altaic language family, which includes Mongolian and Japanese.

But anyway, that's not important. What does Mr. Trecker think about Korea's chances?

PERCENTAGE CHANCE TO PROGRESS: 20%. It's going to be tough. You have to think that Argentina is the group favorite, and Nigeria should get the boost that we expect all African teams to get at this Cup. Greece stinks, but because the Koreans don't score a lot of goals, they could struggle to get on the board.

The Korean thinks that's a fair assessment.

In a related news, the Korean received the shipment this a few days ago. Freakin' sweet.

32 Teams in 32 Days: South Korea [Fox Soccer Channel]