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Why Korean is difficult & how it is easy | ||
Tags: Learning Difficulty | Korean | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6230 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 1 of 6 07 July 2011 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There has been quite a bit of talk ( see: The I Hate Korean thread ) about the fact that Korean is extremely difficult to learn for an English speaker.
For those of you out there who are students/speakers of Korean I am wondering 1. Why specifically you consider it so difficult? and 2. What strategies you used to overcome these difficulties to make learning Korean easier? I am looking forward to hearing your responses!! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6703 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 2 of 6 08 July 2011 at 3:36am | IP Logged | |||||
Elisions, i.e. pronunciation. Like French, Korean syllables just melt into the next one, sometimes changing according to what follows or precedes it, making it harder to extrapolate from what you know to what you're hearing. The grammar. It is very different from English, with its different levels of formality and the way the fact that when we want to modify the verb with a discrete adverb, they want to put a suffix or infix of some kind on the verb. They also have certain verb phrases that take getting used to like "put and come" for forgetting something. And, of course, the vocabulary. I have a good foundation in Chinese and I still find memorizing the vocabulary a strain. In part because of the pronunciation, but in part because it is simply so different from English.
Go to a really good school and compete with those around me. The prize is good Korean. Recruit my wife into the learning process. Try to get as much of the language into my life as possible. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Po-ru Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5481 days ago 173 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin, French | Message 3 of 6 08 July 2011 at 7:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hey liddytime. I'm going to keep my answer short(or try to).
1.Grammar = the grammar of Korean is extremely challenging for native English speaker. The word order is much different to start with, there are hundreds of possible conjugations for verbs and adjectives all representing different meanings and connotations. Also the use of particles is similar to Japanese, but the pronunciation of the particles differs depending on whether it is preceded by a consonant or a vowel. Pronunciation = the sound system of Korean is again much different from English and any other language. There are many letters which represent very similar sounds (for example ㅗ/ㅓ, ㅡ/ㅜ) I've been studying Korean for over a year and it's still hard to catch things on the hear and pick out exactly how words are spelled. After a year of Japanese study I rarely had this problem. Vocabulary = a rich vocabulary with many words sounding similar. Also some words have been borrowed from Chinese, so there are two words which mean the same thing and the Chinese words have respective Chinese characters. 2.What I do to keep myself motivated with Korean is to have fun with it(just like Steve Kaufmann says). Do what you enjoy. Since I started Korean, I had to take up Japanese again for work and school purposes leaving my Korean behind. It really bites because if you want to get good at Korean, you NEED to have it drilled in day after day of hard studying and unfortunately I cannot do that. So what I do now is I change it up and do what I feel like. Some days I can only dedicate maybe 20 minutes of listening to it. Others I will study vocab for 10 minutes, do 30 minutes of listening, then some FSI drills. It is all a matter of keeping myself interested. However, for me right now, Korean needs to take a backseat to Japanese -_-. liddytime, you really do sound like your interested in studying Korean. It will be challenging but in the end it will be well worth it! Start off by familiarizing yourself with the Hangul WELL. I typically disregard any kind of learning material without Hangul. Once you've nearly perfected it, you can read anything from a menu to a doctors report. Don't get discouraged, as you will slowly see results. Native English speakers take years to get good at Korean and honestly, after being around Koreans a lot and taking several visits to Korea, I have only personally seen TWO Westerners who are "fluent" in Korean. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5179 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 4 of 6 08 July 2011 at 11:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, the sounds blend to each other, but the only thing is to remember the rules.
Sogang university course (free) explains them in great detail. As for the grammar it's very regular, the only tricky part is the present informal tense. There is one official irregular verb, to do, and a pseudo verb to be (copula), plus verbs with b as batchim, are slighty irregular, (not all of them, so you have to bear in mind that 씹어 and not 씨워 is correct). However this is much more regular than language like Spanish, or French. The grammar is very different, unless you are Altaic. I find it really interesting, to say "if" you conjugate a verb. The vocabulary is quite hard, unless you know Chinese,Japanese or Vietnamese. I find the vocabulary really rich. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6230 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 5 of 6 09 July 2011 at 3:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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You guys are all awesome!!
Yes, Korean has begun to fascinate me. I have learned Hangul, made it through Unit 15 of Pimsleur and Unit 3 of FSI over the past 2 months. With each lesson the difficulty curve gets noticably steeper and steeper!! I have not been able to understand any spoken Korean yet, but I have gotten to the point where I hear people talking and can identify that they are, in fact, speaking Korean. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4693 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 6 of 6 21 January 2012 at 1:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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I started studying six months ago and find the vocabulary the most difficult. I can't read Hangeul well even after all this time. I often get ㅗ and ㅜ mixed up. In pronunciation and spelling I get ㅗ and ㅓ confused.
Another problem is the large number of homophones. I have to often sift through a list of homophones for several minutes before I find the best one that fits the sentence and then sometimes I am still not sure that's the right word. This slows me down looking up words. I am getting better at looking up root words. ㅂ verbs really confused me because I had trouble finding the roots. For example, 고운. I looked up this word in the dictionary but did not find a satisfactory definition. I looked up 고우 and that yielded no results. I thought about it for a minute and remembered the conjugation rule for ㅂ verbs and on a hunch I looked up 곱다. I hit dirt with that. There are some compensations though with the Korean language. The spelling of verb conjugations is quite regular. You only need to learn a few rules and after that, that's it. The grammar is more or less regular in its application. After revising the grammar book several times (I am learning "Korean Grammar for International Learners"), I am starting to see patterns in grammar. This textbook is really great for me, and I am using this as my main textbook. It has the most comprehensive outline of Korean grammar explained in English that I know of and so after I study this book I won't have to learn another grammar book. I quite like learning grammar and I probably am spending too much time on it but anyway ... I want to know this book back to front so that any tricky constructions I have no difficulty understanding. The main problem is I think the vocabulary. I have to learn about 20,000 words before I can read the newspaper in Korean and this is going to take a lot of work. The words are not like English or other words with Latin or German roots. They are also not easy to pronounce. But knowing vocabulary is the key to learning any language so I will just have to persist with this. My main purpose is to be able to read anything in Korean so I am not concentrating on speaking fluency at the moment. I also want to be fluent in speaking but I will do that later after I have learned all the words I need to know and have a good grasp of grammar. I live in Korea but the problem is one of exposure to the language. I really do not get opportunities to speak in Korean as I go about my daily living. I did pay people for about three to four hours a week to speak to me in Korean but this did not really bear fruit. I dropped this for about a month and am just studying the language on my own. After I have acquired a large vocab base and understand grammar construction of most sentences, I will resume the live speaking practise. But before I do this, I will listen to mp3 files as much as I can and practise speaking from them. So I am at the stage where I have mostly finished the study of the grammar. I just have to do the workbook of the Korean Grammar for International Learners and then I will be done with grammar for a while. I have spent about two months studying grammar. Then I will build up my vocabulary. What helps with learning vocabulary is sounding out the words aloud. Once I have the sound in my mind, it's easier to remember the words. But I am a very visual learner and need to see the word. Without seeing the word and only hearing it, I feel very unsure of myself. So a combination of sounding out the word and reading it many times is the way I will learn vocabulary. I will do a kind of spaced review where I will test myself on the words I learned the day before. My memory has never been the best so I just hope this method helps me learn the vocabulary. I will know that I have reached an adequate level when I can read newspaper articles with relative ease. At the moment I cannot read a single sentence without looking up the dictionary and spending ten minutes parsing it. I can read simple children's comics all right but beyond this I am lost. But I think devoting time to learning vocabulary will advance my knowledge of Korean by a big leap. Oh, when I studied Korean at first I learned from "Korean Grammar in Use" and I learned vocab from a basic vocab book that had 600 basic Korean words. I found both books useful to start me off but I think I spent too much time on Korean Grammar in Use. I thought it was pretty comprehensive at the time but after I came across the International Learners grammar book I realized that the book only touched on a few common grammar points, and that it wasn't nearly enough. But the Korean Grammar in Use book was good for spelling Korean words. Because I studied that book first, I felt confident about my spelling and conjugating of verbs when I started the International Learners book. If I had to do it all over again, I would only revise the Korean Grammar in Use about two times instead of the four times that I did, and I would have moved straight onto the International Learners book after this. The International Learners book has a lot of new vocabulary for the beginner so you don't really need to learn vocabulary separately. In fact without having to look up the words in that book, I probably could have gone through the book in about one-sixth of the time that I did. I would have revised the International Learners book about three times and then did the workbook and then moved onto vocabulary study and then after a while returned to that book to review it again as I would have forgotten much of the grammar. And then I would spend about three months studying vocabulary and then after that moving onto speaking. But I wasted a few months after I finished the intermediate level Korean Grammar in Use mucking around, trying to learn from conversing with Koreans. For me, conversing with Koreans is still useful but I think I will get much more out of doing this if I have done a lot of study on my own, that is, gotten a good handle on the grammar, and have a knowledge of at least 10,000 words. Speaking with Koreans of course is essential for fluency because you learn how people REALLY speak and you pick up the expressions they use. Learning grammar and vocab separately is good for my writing but not so good for speaking which is more spontaneous. Still, I have to study grammar and all that because I want to be competent at writing and reading in Korean as well as speaking in Korean. Edited by Balliballi on 21 January 2012 at 1:54am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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