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Is the difficulty of Korean overrated? | ||
Tags: Korean | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4763 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes  Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 17 of 58 24 January 2012 at 8:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Navajo is widely believed to have the most complex grammar in the world. I wonder if Ardaschir would still consider Korean to be the most difficult to learn if he had tried learning Navajo. I think Moses McCormick has tackled both, would be interesting to hear what he thinks. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4683 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 18 of 58 03 February 2012 at 12:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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I will list some good things about learning the Korean language.
1) Phonetic alphabet. This makes it easier than Chinese and Japanese to look up words in a dictionary. 2) No need to learn Hanja compared to Japanese. Even though a few people in this forum have said it's important to learn some Hanja especially when learning advanced Korean, I have rarely come across Hanja even when reading newspapers. And in daily life in my experience, eg. reading notices pinned on the wall for apartment residents and reading stuff online in Korean, Hanja is practically nonexistent. (Some people might say that the lack of Hanja is a disadvantage as Hanja clarifies the meaning of homonyms.) 3) Pronunciation is regular. You pronounce the words as you see them written as a rule. The irregularities in pronunciation can be written in one page. (This is not to say pronunciation of Korean is easy.) English is more difficult in this regard. The letter "a" can be pronounced a few ways in English. 4) Although the grammar is complex and there are many grammatical terms to learn, the grammar is mostly regular and consistently applied. There are not many exceptions to any given grammatical pattern. 5) Verb conjugation rules are not difficult to learn. You can learn how to conjugate the endings of verbs that end in "b", "l", "leu" etc easily. 6) No (or very few) plurals in Korean (although for me when I was starting to learn Korean it was difficult to adjust to; I tried very hard to make plurals in Korean out of habit and found it strange when I couldn't). 7) There are spaces between words unlike Japanese. 8) There are many Korean dramas these days with English subtitles that foreigners can access for free. 9) Nouns do not have gender. 10) Koreans do not use articles. They do use "eun/neun", "rul/ul", "i/ga" but the rules for using these particles are not as strict as they are for the English articles "a/an" and "the". (I have found that one of the most difficult things for Koreans learning English is mastering the article.) Edited by Balliballi on 03 February 2012 at 5:15am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6189 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 19 of 58 04 February 2012 at 4:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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I find Korean difficult to learn and especially difficult to speak. But I have a feeling that discussion in this forum tends to exaggerate its difficulty somewhat. I'm not sure, but I think many of us posting about Korean are possibly in the high beginner through intermediate stage, and these may be the hardest stages for native English speakers.
If you use one of the Korean university language programs, they're divided into 6 levels. And I'm guessing that most HTLAL posters are in levels 1-4. I study Korean in Korea, and most of my classmates are Japanese. I get discouraged by how much better they are at using Korean. Recently, in class, we were talking about this problem and my Korean teacher told me she understands how I feel, because she has the same problems with English that I have with Korean. She told me that English speakers have a lot of trouble in the early stages of Korean, and it's much easier for the Japanese students. But she said when you get to the higher levels, the English speakers do very well and end up (generally) surpassing the Japanese. She thinks Japanese students get an initial boost from their native language, but the advantage disappears as they progress. I have finished Level 3 and I can feel it getting easier. It's still hard for me and my speaking is terrible, but I'm noticing I feel like things make more sense. Vocab is getting easier as I start to benefit from seeing relationships among word families. I'm feeling optimistic about what's ahead of me. I still think Level 1 was the hardest for me, especially the second half of it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5169 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 20 of 58 04 February 2012 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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한국은 한국이라서 한국이 많다.
what does it say? I meant: 'since Korea is a cold country, there are many winter chrysantema there.' I am in a playful mood. Anyway, I think i agree with the statement about Korean being regular - it's less regular than Japanese, but still much more than most European languages, like : Spanish, German, Italian etc. The biggest problem would be vocabulary - not only hard to learn, but also many sinonims, and many Korean sentences use one word whereas other language would use two words: 민지는 승마하다가 낙마했다. Minji mounted a horse, and fell out of it. I am not a Korean, so sorry if my sentences sound odd, because of insufficient level. but you can see what I mean. 승마 and 낙마 are verbs made up with hanja. none of them contain the Korean word for horse - 말. 흡연하다 you may use it to mean ' to smoke a cigarette' instead of 담배를 피우다. 주차 instead of (자동)차를 세우다(?) 방한 - to visit Korea. instead of 한국에 방문하다. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6428 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 21 of 58 04 February 2012 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
"Because Korea, Korea, a lot of Korea" :) Edited by IronFist on 04 February 2012 at 6:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6329 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes | Message 22 of 58 06 February 2012 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
You need to have knowledge of hanja to understand that joke of his. First 한국 is the country. Second one uses 한 from chinese 寒 which means cold to create "cold country". The third one you need to know hanja again because 국 could also derive from chinese 菊 which of course is a type of flower. So you see without a solid basis in hanja, you will never attain a level comparable to a native speaker of korean. Beginners could ignore hanja but up to a point there will come upon times where you need to muster enough of that knowledge to understand abbreviated expressions. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6428 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 23 of 58 06 February 2012 at 2:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hence my previous assertions that the entire language is full of homophones.
Are all of those "hangook"s pronounced the same way? Or is it like Japanese where sometimes there are homophones but sometimes a different syllable gets the emphasis so you can still kinda tell what the word is when you hear it pronounced? I've heard some people say that while you don't need to know hanja to read Korean (and this supports my experience, too, since I've never seen hanja ever in any Korean books, magazines, rarely on TV, etc.), but learning them can actually help you deal with the vocabulary and all the homonyms by providing sort of a logical framework for it all. Edited by IronFist on 06 February 2012 at 2:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6220 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 24 of 58 06 February 2012 at 4:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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Anyone who doubts the difficulty of Korean for English speakers clearly has not attempted to tame this beast of a
language. I have studied several of the "FSI Category IV languages" and Korean is the only one of them where after several months of study, I could not construct a sentence much past "Anneyong Haseyo!". I think the main points which make it so impenetrable for English speakers is its limited number of phonemes, extremely complex grammar, slurring of words in rapid speech and limited cognates with English. It is really, really tough. I tip my hat to anyone who can surpass a B2 in Korean!! 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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