Korean and Japanese are two very difficult languages to master, though at first Korean appears easier since it has an alphabet. However, contrary to what is sometimes said, the Korean language still uses many characters (usually very similar to the Chinese characters). Thus, the advantage of the alphabet disappears when you reach and advanced level. To access newspapers and more difficult books, you will need to study at least 1300 Hanjas (characters).

The two languages can be compared in a few more areas with regards to their difficulty for the learner:

Japanese is relatively easy to pronounce correctly, whereas Korean makes distinctions between regular, stressed, and aspirated consonants which non-native speakers have a very hard time to distinguish.

Korean grammar is highly complex, and retains many grammatical features that were simplified in Japanese. These make for additional burden on the learner's mind. As Prof. Arguelles, a scholar of the Korean languages, said on the forum : <<If you could get a complete grammatical synopsis of Chinese on, say, 10 pieces of paper, you would probably need about 50 for Japanese and closer to 100 for Korean>>.

In terms of writing systems, Japanese is more complex than Korean as you have to know about 2000 Hanja (characters), most of which change their pronunciation depending on how they are employed, plus two different syllabaries, each with about 50 basic characters and 25-30 diacritical variants. Furthermore, words are generally connected rather than written with spaces in between, and punctuation is limited. Korean, offers a great deal of material that is readable only with the Korean alphabet, whereas Japanese requires you to know characters.

Both Korean and Japanese, on the other hand, how now borrowed hundreds of English words. However, the phonetic structure of these languages usually distorts them to the point of unrecognizability, and they are mainly limited to common items of modern life. So, while they provide a few familiar (and generally funny) links, it is going too far to say that they facilitate the overall task of vocabulary acqusition in these languages.