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Is the difficulty of Korean overrated? | ||
Tags: Korean | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| nhk9 Senior Member Canada Joined 6795 days ago 290 posts - 319 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 58 09 October 2006 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have read numerous threads about Korean on this forum. What I see is that there generally is a consensus that Korean is a "difficult language" to learn and to speak in a fluent level, especially for the westerner who has no prior exposure to languages such as Chinese and Japanese. I speak both Chinese and Japanese, so my opinion may not be bias free, but here's what I think about the Korean language.
A respected professor here wrote that Korean has more than 600+ grammatical patterns (note that I am drawing this from memory so the exact figure maybe off a bit). Actually, probably only a scholar would need to care about the more difficult 500 patterns. Anyone who can speak use the most basic 100+ or so will probably have no problem in making their speech sound somewhat intelligent to the native speaker. Unless you want to be a Korean scholar, understanding all of them is not so important. Another intimidating myth among westerners is that many words are from Chinese origins, thus not knowing Chinese will make vocabulary retention difficult. I see this as a similar relationship between languages like German and Swedish. While knowing German words will make Swedish learning much easier, if you don't know any German, you can still learn Swedish from scratch. Of course, learning another language in another linguistic family for the first time is not easy, but it shouldn't be considered that learning Korean, in this sense, will be any harder than learning something different. Anyway, the large number of homonym may pose a problem, but this problem shouldn't be bigger than other languages that have a similar problem, like Japanese. The pronunciation and listening part may initially seem very difficult. From my experience talking with those who have studied Korean for long durations, getting people to understand you is harder than understanding native Korean speakers. Most problems for the beginner lie in the pronunciation of similar sounding vowels such as "ew" as in English "dew", and "oo" as in English "tool" (sorry this is not standard Korean romanization, if there's one anyway), and in the difference between plain, tense, aspirate plosives such as "b/p, bb/pp, b'/p'". It is awfully hard to learn the differences by using CDs or any other self-learning material alone, since the differences in the sounds for the similar consonants and vowels may often sound the same or indistinguishably similar. In some worse cases, you may hear different sounds for the same vowel/consonant on a CD, perhaps due to difference in dialect, speed, and the quality of the recording. The key to fix the beginner's pronunciation problem is to get a native speaker who can tell you when you make your mistakes. Of course, getting a native speaker in most regions of the world is not an easy task, something which I see as more of a hindrance than any other aspect of the language. All in all, however, the logic (and consistency in pronunciation rules) is great news for those who are used to irregular pronunciation in language such as English and French. Also, some students may note the variation in politeness to be a challenge. Some sites even claim that there are upwards of 7 levels of honorific speech saying the same thing. Actually, understanding of just a couple or 3 will get your message across fairly well. This honorific system may be somewhat of a challenge at first, but since most conjugation are systematic, there's no need to use rote memory too much (which is great news for those used to doing that). And best of all, its honorific system is of the "absolute" style, which means that you pay your respect to whomever that has a socially higher status when you talk to whoever. This is not nearly as bad as some other "relative" styles that are seen in some other East Asian languages. While I may make Korean sound like an easy language, there are still some points one must consider when thinking about learning the language. First, while Koreans are friendly and eager to teach your language, they will not correct your mistakes unless you really insist that they do, as they don't want to "offend" you. It is also advisable to ask the same question to different native speakers so that you are sure you are getting the consistent answer that you want. Second, be prepared for the massive number of homonyms, since the limited number of consonants and similar sounding words (especially native Korean-made words) do make for a good memory test. Some words can have upwards of 12 definitions, such as "sada" (albeit most of such definitions are obscure ones), it's certainly something to get used to. While learning hanja (Chinese characters) will be helpful in learning the Chinese-made words, it is not necessary. SUMMARY I hope you have made it this far. Just to summarize, I think users here think Korean as a harder language than it really is. In order to get to the fluency where you will not sound stupid to native ears, the best ways are to find a native speaker to correct pronunciation and to understand how Korean society works. After that, just add in your normal vocab-learning routine and grammar-drilling skills, you should find yourself speaking intelligent Korean in no time. Just about myself: I don't consider myself to be "fluent" in Korean, but I did spend my months learning this language intensively in University earlier. Right now just taking a breather and concentrating on something else. The above are just my view points, and I would like to hear more from you guys about this subject. Thanks! Edited by nhk9 on 10 October 2006 at 12:27am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| lengua Senior Member United States polyglottery.wordpre Joined 6675 days ago 549 posts - 595 votes Studies: French, Italian, Spanish, German | Message 2 of 58 10 October 2006 at 12:03am | IP Logged | ||
A very imformative post, nhk - thank you. I particularly agree with your straightforward approach to proficiency - finding a native speaker for the intangibles, and from there, treating it as any other language, with regards to grammar and vocab acquisition. When I eventually decide to give the language a go, I'll remember your post. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hagen Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6951 days ago 171 posts - 179 votes 6 sounds Speaks: German*, English, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 58 10 October 2006 at 2:06am | IP Logged | ||
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I was thinking along the same lines when I saw Korean more and more being regarded as the prototypical hyper difficult language on this board. After having my daily dose of Korean grammar I tend to agree, but when viewed more objectively I think it's hard to justify that Korean should be in another league than the rest of the world's languages.
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| kinoko Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6627 days ago 103 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, Japanese, Spanish Studies: German | Message 4 of 58 10 October 2006 at 4:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I have myself studied several languages belonging to different families (Romance, Slavic, Asian), and I understood how the approach to any should be different.
Ardaschir, one of the biggest polyglots of this board, whose methods and posts are well known and appreciated by all of us, rated Korean as the most difficult languages from the English native speaker fpoint of view, followed by Japanese. Though of course a generalization, as all the ratings are, I agree with him. What I may partially disagree with him is in the method he used for studying Korean. He successfully based his early (and advanced as well, to a certain degree) approach to any foreign language on the undoubtly effective Assimil-shadowing technique, over and over, to the point of "internalizing" the essence of the language and learning vocabulary without actually memorizing it the "hard way". I find that, whilst this method is tremendously effective for almost all the languages -expecially the ones closer to our native one- things should be approached slightly differently for Korean and Japanese. I think it was due to this lack of flexibility that it took such a talented, experienced and knowledgeble polyglot, so many years (he LIVED in Korea for 9 years, whilst he was able to get fluency in other languages in few months without even ever visiting those countries) to learn that indeed complex tongue. What I think is that Japanese and Korean, which have recourse to Henja and Kanji to get over the huge problem of the scarsity of alphabet sounds and the consequent high number of omophones, absolutely require an initial substrate of hard memorization. Not only memorization in context, but initial memorization of hundreds of compound words derived from the association of henja/kanji syllables. One should start learning Henja/kanji since the beginning not only to be able to learn how to read, but also to understand where those words, most of them omophones, come from. If knowing latin to know the origin of words tremendously helps in European languages, that have no omophones and for this reason provide us with multisyllabic words with almost no omophones and are much easier to be grasped and remembered, in Japanese and Korean knowing Kanji from the beginning is absolutely essential. This can't initially come without brute memorization. It means taking a character after the other starting from the basic ones and memorize its reading AND the most important and basic words that are the consequence of that character aggregation with other ones. This will reinforce word memorization, reading memorization, better understanding of how the language is structured. Whithout doing this just trying to get rominized approach and listening and repetition practice will lead only to a very basic knowledge, which would never progress once our brain gets bombarded by ten or more omophonetic meanings for each word. It's that the reason why understanding the news, which use all the variety of compound words the language provide us with, is so difficult. Without really associating each sound to preaviously memorized chunks of words and pistograms all the foreign learner would end up listening will be nothing more than an incoherent repetition of the same sounds, something like ko ou shin shi tei sa mei in ka ou mu sa to kin sou shin ... etc... Try putting down a newspaper article or a page of a novel in hiragana instead of kanji and you would see a native speaker struggle through it. Tha reason why a native speaker understands through the omophonetic news speach is thanks to his 100% understanding of the context that makes it clear what the meaning of each word is. Still even a native speaker wouldn't be really able to understand the news if not paying attention to them and listening half heartedly. Just image how tough this may be for a foreign learner. The poor student is likely not to understand most of the words HE KNOWS just because not understanding those he doesn't know, those he knows are lost in the mess of the omophones. If ones listen to let's say an English speach and knows the word "request" and recognizes it, no matter if not understanding any other, still the word "request" will not be missed. Not the same would be for the Japanese "kou", just to say one. To sum up my point of view: Ardashir is absolutely right when talks about the difficulties of Korean. Just it would probably help a little the beginner and intermediate learner memorizing the first 1000 kanji and let's say the first 6000 compound words(of course studying grammar along, drilling, listening and doing all sort of practice one may find effective). With this solid base even if still unsecure, not fluent, often missing words, forgetting characters and so on, one can start connecting things as a whole and the language in all its forms, written and spoken, will unveil its secrets little by little. From that moment on the Assimil shadowing technique, together with other methods one may find effective, will start working better even with Korean and Japanese. But be ready for some hard brute memorization of some sort when you start studying, way more than what you may be used to with other tongues. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6759 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 5 of 58 10 October 2006 at 6:33am | IP Logged | ||
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Very interesting post, Kinoko.
For learning Korean and Japanese, metacognitive strategy may be a lot more important. In other words, having a learning strategy isn't enough. You need a strategy for choosing and evaluating your strategies. :) Even though a lot of rote memorization is required for one's core vocabulary (6,000 words or so), some people — like me — won't be able to carry that memorization out unless it's combined with other activities and learning methods. Korean (and Japanese) may or may not be particularly difficult; the bigger issue is perhaps that learning these languages efficiently requires you to be good at learning, whereas any Westerner can succeed at French or Spanish even with clumsy learning methods. That sounds about right; in learning Japanese, I've learned a whole lot on how to learn, and I think this will carry over to future languages. Heck, I've been studying Portuguese for less than a month and I can already read simple articles. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kinoko Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6627 days ago 103 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, Japanese, Spanish Studies: German | Message 6 of 58 10 October 2006 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I couldn't agree with you more! I feel I could learn an "easier" lenguage, or another language in general, in zero time and in the most efficient way after a year of hours of daily exsperimentation with language learning while learning Japanese. I feel I am just holding it back and that when my Japanese level will have got much better, letting me relax a little with it, starting to learn another language will be pure pleasure!
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| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7006 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 58 10 October 2006 at 10:57am | IP Logged | ||
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@nhk9: A very informative post. I might even change my mind about learning Korean someday :)
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| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7068 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 8 of 58 12 October 2006 at 3:32am | IP Logged | ||
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I'll agree with all above.
Korean is hard, but not impossible. The reputation all comes down to the mystique. The two parts that seem to baffle English speakers are lack of transparency with vocabulary, and the syntax. These both require dedication and some realignment of your brain ;) It seems to me that since Korean and Japanese are written in alien scripts (for want of a better word) that they are deemed exceedingly difficult languages. But step back and take an objective glance at Turkish. If Japanese and Korean deserve five stars, why does Turkish only achieve three stars? The same syntactical and lexical differences are present when compared with English. The difference; roman script. [I may as well point out that I am yet to study any Turkish, so can only see it on the surface] 1 person has voted this message useful |
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