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Is the difficulty of Korean overrated? | ||
Tags: Korean | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Quackers Triglot Newbie United States Joined 6741 days ago 18 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English*, French, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Bengali, Armenian, Italian, Russian | Message 9 of 58 12 October 2006 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Bengali also received three cacti in the difference department. Like Japanese, Bengali has a heavy reliance on postpositions instead of prepositions and an SOV structure. However, while Bengali and Turkish rely on an alphabet, Korean and Japanese do not. In order to read and write Korean and Japanese, one has to learn hundreds of characters derived from Chinese. It is this lack of an alphabet, rather than the lack of Roman script, which contributes to the higher difficulty rating for Chinese and Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4721 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes  Studies: Korean | Message 10 of 58 21 January 2012 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The difficulty of Korean for English speakers (who do not know Japanese or Chinese) is not overrated in my opinion.
I have studied French and found that relatively easy to learn. Let's say it's number 2 on the scale of difficulty. Korean is 9 on the scale of difficulty. The only good thing about it compared to Chinese and Japanese is that it is written in a phonetic alphabet. Other than that, the grammar is about 100 times harder than Chinese and about fifty times harder than Japanese (my guess as I haven't learned those languages). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4778 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 11 of 58 23 January 2012 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Korean is difficult to pronounce, there are 4 ways how to pronounce P/B. :(
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| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5410 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 12 of 58 23 January 2012 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
But Korean has no stress or pitch accent, unlike Japanese. Since each word has its own pitch and must be learned individually, I'd say that's a lot more complicated than figuring out b/p/p'. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4730 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 13 of 58 23 January 2012 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Korean and Japanese are rougly the same, grammatically. It would be a walk in the park for a native speaker of either language to pick up the other. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5410 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 14 of 58 23 January 2012 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
I met a Korean girl this weekend who told me she thought Japanese was harder than English... except that her Japanese was excellent, and a lot better than her English, so that didn't make much sense. The reference section mentions that about 40% of the words of both languages are similar, which resembles what you'd find with English and French (which are not in the same language family either). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4730 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 15 of 58 23 January 2012 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Maybe because of cultural differences? I really don't know. It just doesn't make sense.
I can tell you that for me, as a German, learning English wasn't even learning. I just lived long enough to eventually get it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6731 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 16 of 58 24 January 2012 at 6:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have to go to bed now, and probably won't be able to post my entire thoughts until tomorrow night, but the OP both has a point and misses the point. Among Adrishar's comments about Korean was that to learn colloquial Korean, it was much easier and shouldn't be considered among the most difficult languages. To learn it well made it difficult.
Having spent the last year and change studying Korean at one of the best schools for learning languages in the world, I'd actually say he's wrong. I've studied Chinese to a pretty high level and have a grasp of Japanese, but Korean has been harder than both of them. While I'm the only person that I know around here who has experienced all three, the people who have studied either Chinese or Japanese have said that they think Korean is harder than whichever they studied. Does this mean it's impossible? No. Even with all the loan words (which one of my teachers estimates at 10% if the commonly used vocabulary), the language is still very opaque for an English speaker. You have to dedicate more time and effort to it than Spanish or even Russian. Of course, one of the problems if you want to study it is to build it up as the Big Bad of languages. To that, I agree with the OP that it shouldn't be treated as a legendary language-learner-killing language. It's a language after all. Natives can learn it. Non-natives can learn it. Don't kid yourself about learning it quickly, but even people who study Spanish realize that it takes time to learn all those words. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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