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Why are Korean and Arabic considered hard | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| sjheiss Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5530 days ago 100 posts - 174 votes  Speaks: English*, Basque | Message 25 of 57 03 January 2011 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
I directed that comment mostly to leosmith, who firmly believes that I have no knowledge of languages, while in fact I do, in spite of not yet becoming fluent in another language. Everyone on this forum has a right to provide their insight, not just people that have learned to speak another language fluently. When I was talking about the script, I was talking to Préposition, not you. Of course swearing is disrespectful, or else what would be the use of it? The purpose of swearing is to convey strong emotions:
And I never stated that people think another language is hard because of the fact that it has a different script, I was only referring to the script, not the language. Edited by sjheiss on 03 January 2011 at 9:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5612 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 26 of 57 03 January 2011 at 9:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
I too have a good visual memory, paired with an about average auditory memory and an excellent memory for concepts and unnecessary details. In that post I never claimed that Korean had to be difficult for anyone else. But - and I wonder if you didn't think of this first - I tend to observe my peers and compare my own struggles with theirs. From experience I can say that for a given task, if I find it difficult, the majority of those with a similar background are also very likely to find it difficult, and those with less experience in learning languages are likely to find it even more difficult. Let me clarify, with difficulty I mean that it takes more time, repetition and various approaches to learn a given task than it does for a comparable task. ETA: With sandhi I meant less unreleased stops as I found those easy to get used to, but rather assimilation processes like 말하다 being pronounced as marada, not mal-hada. Edited by Bao on 04 January 2011 at 3:17am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| CheeseInsider Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4968 days ago 193 posts - 238 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French, German | Message 27 of 57 04 January 2011 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can't speak Korean or Arabic, but I have some friends who are learning Arabic and they say it's mostly the pronunciation that makes it really difficult. But obviously I can't ensure the validity of that statement, especially since they have not reached fluency in Arabic.
On a somewhat related note, there should really be 2 language difficulty lists, one for the spoken language and one for the written. Because for example, Mandarin's spoken difficulty does not correspond with it's written difficulty, which can mislead people into thinking that learning to speak AND write it will be extremely hard. Also, Sjheiss's initial post seemed innocent enough, why did he get grief over it? :S Edited by CheeseInsider on 04 January 2011 at 7:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jtdotto Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5075 days ago 73 posts - 172 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, German | Message 28 of 57 09 January 2011 at 11:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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First a small amount of autobiographical info: having read this forum for some time, I can group myself with the
fairly accomplished Korean speakers among these ranks - I'm not perfect and have met a good dozen people who are much further along than me, but based on my ability to read the news with moderate dictionary use, short stories and novels for enjoyment with the use of crutches (a translation for more difficult sentences), and based on the countless hours I've spent refining my speaking and listening to the point where (even surprisingly to me) I can finally join a group of college educated Korean speakers and engage in fairly colloquial, natural speed conversation and crack jokes that are culturally contextual, I feel like I speak with some authority on the matter of Korean and its difficulty for Western learners, hopefully putting the entertaining, yet somewhat rude, argument to bed in a sense, and offering insight into the original question posed in the topic title. Korean is a difficult language. I studied Spanish for about 5 or so years through high school and into college, and though I was never as motivated as I have been for Korean, the learning curve for Spanish was fairly relaxing. Countless cognates, similar grammar, in some sense similar culture, wide access to native speakers and media - all these factors have been played to my advantage. Imagine this: compare the syllabus for a university summer quarter, first year intensive class for Spanish with the syllabus for a university summer quarter, first year intensive Korean class. By the second week, where will the Spanish learners be? Where will the Korean learners be? The Spanish learners will probably be learning daily vocabulary on top of the basics already learned, and will be plugging them into memorized sentence structures, along with building a concrete foundation of the conjugation system (possibly delving into the past tense perhaps?). On the other hand, the Korean learners will have pretty much spent the entire first week learning and mastering the Korean alphabet and and a few fixed expressions, thus making the second week the first week of textbook learning, in which case they would probably begin with "this is there" and "that is there". Imagine these students at the end of the quarter. The Spanish learner jumps into second year where they are introduced to annotated native literature, expected to produce a good amount of writing, and will have a good grounding in orally expressing their day to day life - unrefined, yet passable survival Spanish. Now how about those Korean learners? Second year begins with a review of all the conjugation along with a barrage of a ton of new words. Texts are most likely still school related, and oral proficiency is just beginning to sprout, because, although these students studied hard throughout the quarter, speaking in SOV with markers signifying subject, object, topic, place, etc. and completely foreign phrasing takes a certain amount of processing time, even for the talented language learner. Will they be reading any annotated native texts? Not by a long shot. Will they be expected to produce a certain volume of writing? Writing will be apart of the course, but will be in the form of group skits and basic self introduction papers as midterms and finals, along with a growing, but limited vocabulary (activities the Spanish learner will remember from the summer days). In fact even intermediate readers will not be introduced until the third year, while by that time the Spanish learner should be well into refining their speaking and listening, wrestling with the news and literature with some ability. I've personally experienced the summer intensive first year Korean and the subsequent second and third years, and the end of Spanish's first year and the beginning of their second year at my university. 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4538 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 29 of 57 21 January 2012 at 5:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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Korean is difficult because:
1) Conjugations. Instead of using a whole separate word or words to explain meaning as in English (for example, in English we say "in order to" meaning intention, in Korean we add "려"), Korean tacks endings to verb stems, and you have to know the conjugation rules for the different verb stems. In other words you can't just always add them to the verb stems either, you have to change the verb endings sometimes. Eg. 춥다 becomes 추워요. English does have conjugations when it comes to changing the tenses of verbs but that's the only time you need to do this. With Korean you have to do it for all sorts of grammatical meanings. I counted like about a thousand (at least) instances of conjugations and particle endings that are found in Korean where you must add them to the word (and often you have to change the ending of the word before you do so). So Korean grammar is a lot about conjugating words. Sometimes you have to add up to four conjugational endings to the word - eg. indirect speech, honorifics, part of speech (order, suggestion, normal statement, question), speech particle and an ending like 면 or a word showing tense or a speech level word. 2) Koreans often drop pronouns and they frequently do not include the subject in a sentence. I don't know who is doing what when I read Korean sentences. 3) Some laxity in definitions. For example 싫다 can mean both "I dislike" and "it is unlikeable" or "it is unliked". 4) Many homophones. Sometimes even with the context, it is hard to work out which homophone they are using in a sentence 5) They have two sets of numbers - Sino-Korean and Pure Korean. 6) Word order is different to English. Also word order is more flexible in Korean. The stricter word order in English helps you understand the meaning. You know that the subject comes before the object so you know who is doing it to whom but in Korean, you sometimes find it hard to understand who is doing what to whom. Koreans have object markers but they don't always use them in speech so it's hard to understand sometimes what is the object of the sentence. 7) Koreans have something called a subject marker 는 and 은. Sometimes the word with this particle is the subject and sometimes it is the object. 8) Koreans use adnominal phrases/clauses which can go on for very long. It is only at the end of the clause that you realize it was an adnominal clause and not the main one. Sometimes it's very hard to see the adnominal clause. Eg. "for children exercising it's good for wearing thing it is clothes". You might go "WHAT?" until you realize that the sentence is structured like this: "(for children exercising it's good for wearing) thing it is clothes" "These clothes are good for children when they are exercising." The stuff in the parentheses are describing the thing that are clothes. These are real mind-twisters for me but Koreans have no problems with this construction because they use it all the time. 9) Difficult pronunciation for English speakers. I cannot for the life of me say "설릉" (Seolleung) properly. A Korean tried to get me to say it properly but I couldn't after several tries. I can't say 의 or 회의 properly either. It's hard for me to say 어 and 오 correctly so that they sound different. I end up pronouncing them the same way. Also, 에 and 예. And ㄱ and ㅋ and ㄲ . Some Korean kids made fun of me when I tried to say "I have a cold." I tried to say 감기 but I said 캄기 . They teased me mercilessly about it. Korean has a lot of guttural sounding words. Many words that have consonants next to each other sound harsh on the ear eg. 걱정 (Actually this is not too bad but it's the only one I can think at the top of my head.) Japanese is much easier to pronounce because 99% of the time it is consonant followed by vowel (this is what I have been told. I don't actually know Japanese). I know there are some pronunciation rules that elide out the sounds so they sound less like this but there are still many words that have consonant sounds next to each other. 10) Honorifics. It's really difficult for me personally to remember where to add the "shi" in verbs and so on. 11) Four speech levels at least. Not only do you have to add different conjugations to show meaning you have to change the endings of the verbs to show different politeness levels. What a nightmare! (Plus add honorifics as needed.) 12) Differences between written Korean and spoken Korean. Eg. 간다 (written) and 가다 (spoken). 13) Not many resources for learning Korean. It's better than it was ten years ago but still not as many as for say learning Spanish or French. 14) Hangeul script. The nature of Hangeul script makes it harder and slower to read than English. Instead of a letter following a letter horizontally on a line, the words are stuck together in different ways, sometimes they are on top of each other, sometimes next to each other. Sometimes there are three letters on top of each other. Your eye has to make all sorts of motions to read a word. Also, from a distance it's harder to make out the characters than it is for English. Also some characters look alike. 웃 and 옷. You have to spend a few seconds working out what the word is. Also ㅂ and ㅁ look alike. ㄱ and ㅈ , ㅁ and ㅇ. All these things slow down your reading and can lead to you making mistakes in writing and reading. I really do not like Hangeul although if you spoke to most Koreans you would think it was the best invention in the world. 15) Adopted English words. eg. 바나나 In English, it's pronounced "bananah" but in Korean it's pronounced "bah-nah-nah". If you try and pronounce the word in the English way, they won't understand you. 16) Poor understanding of Romanization by Koreans. They will spell the iceskating champion's name as "Kim Yuna" 김연아". An English speaker will automatically pronounce the word as "Kim Yoona" only to be corrected by a Korean person. (The same thing happens with English words when Koreans use them in their language. Mispronunciation of English words abound because many if not most Koreans do not understand Romanization of their language. Eg. If they saw the word "bang" they would spell it in Korean as 방 because for Koreans "a" = 아 . They don't understand that English words have different pronunciations of vowels unlike Korean which is pretty much regular, and they will have difficulty understanding why it is pronounced as 뱅 . This affects many words that are introduced into the Korean language because they mispronounce them due to incorrect understanding of Romanization.) 17) Koreans' knowledge of English. It is compulsory to learn English in school and there is a fad for learning English there anyway so many Koreans can understand English and speak at least a little of it (their English will always be better than your Korean when you are starting out). Not only that but they will see an encounter with a foreigner as a chance to practise their English and with long and repeated encounters, a chance to LEARN English conversation from the foreigner. So they are unlikely to speak much Korean with you even though you need the practice as a learner. I did language exchange and we always ended up speaking 90% of the time in English even though I explained that we should do it half-half. I gave up because it was always unfair and I was giving people free English lessons and not getting anything much in return. Same even with people I PAID to speak in Korean with me 100% of the time. Half of the people I hired thought it was a good chance to learn English from a foreigner (AND BE PAID FOR IT AT THE SAME TIME). One lady even brought a notebook and would write whatever words I said in English down and would look up her dictionary even though she was supposed to teach me Korean conversation. She tried very hard to speak English throughout the lesson. Very blatant what her intentions were. True I wasn't paying these peopele very much but they shouldn't have accepted if they had ulterior motives and weren't going to do the job they were meant to do. So if you are an English speaker, expect that the opportunities to practise Korean with native speakers will be very small even in-country. (It is different if your native language is something else and your English is poor. Then Koreans will have no choice but to speak Korean with you.) This is the reason why many foreigners leave Korea after spending many years there with practically zero knowledge of Korean. When the same people go somewhere else they will pick up the native language without even trying, because the situation is different to Korea. 18) Korean society. Very closed and still Confucist in many ways even though the average Korean will deny it. If you do not belong to a certain group you will be completely ignored. There is less friendliness and making of friendships that cross boundaries like age, sex, nationality, job, status, wealth, class etc as there is in eg America. So basically it's harder to make friends there than it is in the US, and therefore fewer opportunities to practise your Korean. Plus if you are an English teacher as most foreigners who come to Korea are, they will be working in an almost exclusively English speaking environment and so there is little chance for you to practise Korean or pick it up in the workplace. This is different for DDD workers who do have to speak Korean in their jobs. As a result they pick it up relatively fast - fluent in less than a year in many cases - although their writing and reading are probably not very good. ... There are probably a few more points that I have missed but I can't think of them now. 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Voodie Tetraglot Newbie Russian Federation Joined 4650 days ago 17 posts - 40 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, GermanC1, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Written), Greek | Message 30 of 57 21 January 2012 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As for Arabic, I'd point out several things.
First of all, to become really fluent in Arabic (meaning being able both to read and to speak) you need to learn 2 languages (MSA and a dialect). From my own experience I can tell you that not all the arabs can communicate freely in MSA. Most people understand it but they are not used to using it themselves, so what you hear is usually a mixture of dialect grammar and MSA words (sometimes completely unrecognizable because of the dialect pronunciation). MSA itself is rather complex in terms of grammar. Cases (which, for some reason, are the main indicators of difficulty for many people at this forum) are very easy, but verb conjugation is a nightmare. Just let's count how many verb forms one root can potentially give us: 12 forms in the present tense appear in 3 moods - 36 including passive voice: 36 * 2 = 72 + Imperative (5 forms) = 77 + Verbals (2 participles and 1 masdar) = 80 + 24 forms in the past tense (including passive) = 104 and now just multiply it by 10 derivational forms = 1040 forms (!) and that doesn't even cover differences in conjugation itself (weak roots etc) which are quite numerous. The system is quite regular and some forms are extremely rare, but still you have to remember several hundred forms and recognize the others. The vocabulary of Arabic is chaotic. Many new things and concepts don't have their established names. Scientific terms are either borrowed or conveyed in a descriptive way. But at the same time, words referring to everyday life (including actions and emotions) can have dozens of synonyms. And the author is very likely to use several of them in one paragraph or even in one sentence. I remember stumbling upon 6 different words for a lion in a Saudi short story for schoolchildren! By the way, sentences are extremely looooong and the punctuation marks are either not used at all or used where they are least expected. Combined with very unusual syntax, it makes the text look very alien and thus very difficult to decrypt. The latter is mostly attributed to literary texts; newspapers are not that tough. Phonetics and script did not seem difficult to me. It is something you just get used to. To sum up, Arabic is a great intellectual challenge, both tough and very rewarding. Not only can you look at the Islamic culture from a completely different angle, but also there are many linguistic bonuses. Turkic and Indo-Iranian languages become much more accessible. Not even to mention that having mastered Arabic, you will hardly have any problems with European languages :) Edited by Voodie on 21 January 2012 at 4:11pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4538 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 31 of 57 22 January 2012 at 3:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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This is an example of what Korean grammar is like. This paragraph was taken from an online news site.
경찰과 저축은행 비리 합동수사단 (단장 권익환 부장검사)에 따르면 이날 오전 9시30분께 서울 반포동 팔래스호텔 11층 객실 침대 옆에서 김 회장이 쪼그려 앉은 채 숨져 있는 것을 호텔을 방문한 친척 손모씨가 발견했다. My translation: "According to the police and the joint team [단] (the leader of the those with rights and interests in the matter and the general managing prosecutor of this case) investigating the bank irregularities, that day at around 930am in Seoul at Palace Hotel on the 11th of _______ Pres Kim was found dead. He was found squatting beside his hotel room bed by a grieving relative who went to visit him at the hotel." NOTES: * 호텔을 방문한 (친척) = describes the relative ("hotel visiting" relative) * ... 것을 (호텔을 방문한 친척 손모씨가) 발견했다. The subject of this sentence is 친척 손모씨가 (family member mourner) and the object of the sentence is 것을 (thing). * The part before 것을 is the long adnominal clause describing 것을 (이날 오전 9시30분께 서울 반포동 팔래스호텔 11층 객실 침대 옆에서 김 회장이 쪼그려 앉은 채 숨져 있는). * There is a separate clause at the beginning starting with “if” or “according to”: 경찰과 저축은행 비리 합동수사단 = "according to the police and the joint investigating team" * 환=and? <---- I am not sure about this. Definition key (taken from Android dictionary): 경찰=the police 합동=joint, combination, coalition, union 단=team 단장=leader of a party 권익=rights and interests 부장=general manager 검사=public prosecutor 따르다=follow, go after a person, shadow, depend on something -에 따라 = according to [see the textbook conjugations section] 께=around 객실=a drawing room, a guest room 회장=a meeting place, grounds, site; the president 쪼그리다=crouch, squat, hunker down 쪼그리고 앉다 / 쪼그려 앉다 = squatting on one’s heels 채=as it stands; yet; poles, shafts; a whip, rod, switch, cane; cutting in thin strips; a building, a house, a wing 숨지다=breathe one’s last, expire, die 손모=wear and tear, wastage, a loss 친척 손모씨=grieving relative??? ___________________________________________ So just with this short paragraph, it takes a long time and a lot of work to translate it. Without having studied grammar, I wouldn't have been able to parse it. Also, because I studied some vocabulary books, I figured out that 합동수사단 meant "joint investigating team". I could find "합동" and "수사" in the dictionary but thought "단" was a particle or conjugational ending. The sentence didn't grammatical sense though if 단 was a variation of 다 so this stumped me for a long time. Then I remembered from my vocab study that 단 means "team" and the mystery cleared up. As you can see, it takes a while until you meet the main subject of the main clause which is "grieving relative", and it also takes a while before you encounter the object which is "thing". And there is a really long adnominal clause describing "thing". The adnominal clause describes the body of the man lying in the hotel room. There is no punctuation either such as commas and capitalization to help you see the separation between the clauses and recognize proper nouns. And as I said, I needed knowledge of grammar to translate this otherwise I would not have known about: -에 따라 = according to -은/는 채 = as it stands Even though I have studied grammar, it took ages to work out what this short paragraph meant and translate it into English. Edited by Balliballi on 22 January 2012 at 6:03am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4547 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 32 of 57 22 January 2012 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The handling of subordinate clauses looks similar to Japanese.
東京の大学の先生のお母さんの車の中に犬が 居る。 tokyo's university's professor's mother's car inside dog is. there's a dog inside the car of the tokyo university's professor's mother. (ahh, this one was rather easy, it was just a row of possessives, and in plain form) :p fun to learn, but sometimes quite hard to produce. it's also hard to get, because you have to listen through the sentences to the end, then recollect what's been mentioned, then apply an understandable order to understand it. i bet there are ways to make things easier, but if there are any, i didn't stumble upon them yet. Edited by atama warui on 22 January 2012 at 9:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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