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When we are talking about morphology in linguistics, we are referring to the study of those forms ("morphs") which have meaning in a language, more precisely the smallest units of meaning in a language. These units of meaning are called morphemes. A morpheme can be a word that can stand independently and have meaning or it may be a piece (an affix) that attaches to the beginning of a word (a prefix), goes inside a word (an infix), attaches at the end of a word (a suffix) or preceeds or follows a word to add additional meaning ( preposition or postposition, repsectively), or surrounds a word (a circumfix). A morpheme that normally does not function meaningfully by itself is said to be bound, it has to bind with another form to give any valuable meaning. Other morphemes are free and can stand on their own independent of any affixes, prepositions, or postpositions and have meaning; such morphemes are what we commonly think of as a word: book, river, week, table, etc.
Some morphemes are what we call bound morphemes, because they have to be used with another word to apply their functional meaning. Prefixes like un-, re- , among others. By themselves, they aren't very useful and make no sense. But we can make new words with them: reorganize, redo, review, recover, reform, undo, uncover, etc. Still, other fully independent words can be combined to give a new word with new meaning. Think of a word like understandable, which can be broken down into three independent free morphemes- under|stand|able. When trying to sparse a word into its component morphemes, it can be helpful to divide them up with a method that you find useful: re|do, use|less, anti|politic|al, dis|appoint|ed, dis|courag|ing, mal|function, etc.
Languages differ from another in the amount of morphology they may utilize or in the type of morphology they exhibit. Some languages have more verb morphology, others more morphology associated with nouns. Morphological changes to a verb are what you may have heard as conjugations, while the morphology of a noun is inflection.
Agglutinative languages: Languages characterized by the use of lots of affixes may often be called agglutinvative languages; they tend to "glue" or attach other bits of information to convey various shades of meaning. They may also be called "synthetic" in the sense through synthesizing new words and bits of meaning with the use of affixes.
Hungarian and Finnish, two Finno-Ugric languages, are rather high on the side of agglutination, morphology, and degree of synthesis. Turkish and Korean also fall into the classification of agglutinative languages.
Finnish example: we can take the word for 'house', talo and add different endings to get new meaning with endings such as -ssa which means inside a place: talossa 'in the house'; with a plural marker -i-, we get taloissa 'in the houses. Possession can be coded with various possessive suffixes--ni- 'my' , -mme- 'our', so 'in our houses' is taloissamme. Finally, a suffix -kin can be added to bring out meaning in the sense of "as well as" or "also", or "too". If we wanted to say 'in our houses also', Finnish would be taloissammekin. Here are the morphemes separated by slashes: talo|i|ssa|mme|kin. There is a certain hierarchy to the order of Finnish morphemes. They can't just be randomly attached to the word, but have a certain order, with plural marker being first, followed by the marker for location, then possession, and last the marker for inclusion.
Challenge: with the information about Finnish morphology, can you write the "word" for 'in our cars also'? The Finnish word for car is 'auto'. It inflects the same way as the word for 'house' in the above explanation.
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Fusional languages: Languages that employ agglutination may also exhibit fusion. What is meant by this is that when elements with meaning are put together "fused", some changes in spelling may also occur.
Estonian, although closely related to Finnish and more distantly to Hungarian, demostrates sufficient synthesis and agglutination, but more fusion also. It is not uncommon for word to undergo drastic spelling changes when endings are glued to a free morpheme. Consider the word for room, 'tuba'. This word can vary from the standard "dictonary form", 'tuba' to 'toa'. Although English isn't considered a very aggluntinating or synthetic language, it does exhibit some fusional characteristics. Think of the word 'history' and how derivatives change a bit in spelling: historical, historic, historian. The 'y' undergoes a bit of sound change, so it is preserved with the 'i'. Some other examples: 'goose'-'geese', child-children. Can you think of others?
More about language classification in the Typology section.