MLSUSA94 Groupie United States linguisticventures19 Joined 5708 days ago 50 posts - 53 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French
| Message 1 of 4 03 July 2009 at 4:17am | IP Logged |
Recently, I have been flirting with other languages in my non-studying time. My growing interest of Korean is starting to grow and grow into an unstoppable love affair. However, one thing that has caught my eye is the fact that some say that it is more difficult than Japanese and Chinese, which both have the common use of non phonetic characters; I am aware that Korean uses "hanja". What exactly makes Korean hard? I am not in denial or anything, I am simply curious to find the answer from Korean learners and language experts. Thanks.
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Rmss Triglot Senior Member Spain spanish-only.coRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6564 days ago 234 posts - 248 votes 3 sounds Speaks: Dutch*, English, Spanish Studies: Portuguese
| Message 2 of 4 03 July 2009 at 8:30am | IP Logged |
There's already a (recent) topic about this. If you just looked at the first page of "General discussion" you would've known the answer:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=15695&PN=1
Edited by Rmss on 03 July 2009 at 8:31am
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ChrisWebb Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6263 days ago 181 posts - 190 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean
| Message 3 of 4 07 July 2009 at 8:31pm | IP Logged |
I think if you want to learn Korean you should just go for it. Objectively it is a hard language for a native English speaker but it is just a language and if you want it enough you can learn it. All you have to really do is decide how much do you want it, if it's enough then you'll do enough work to get through the difficulties.
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gaa1gaa1 Newbie China Joined 5614 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin*
| Message 4 of 4 17 July 2009 at 10:25am | IP Logged |
MLSUSA94 wrote:
the fact that some say that it is more difficult than Japanese and Chinese, which both have the common use of non phonetic characters; I am aware that Korean uses "hanja". What exactly makes Korean hard? I am not in denial or anything, I am simply curious to find the answer from Korean learners |
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As a native Chinese speaker, I had ever learnt Korean on and off, from 1992 to 1995, before I decided to give it up, and turned to learn Japanese on my own. The grammar of Korean is very similar to Japanese, but different from Chinese, and if you'd like to compare Korean carefully with Japanese in detail, you could find korean a little more difficult than Japanese, in the aspects of pronunciation (reading rules of 받침), minor differences in grammar and usage, also, maybe the Hanja system is an obstacle for those who don't know anything about Chinese characters. But I think the most difficult part should be its agglutinative structure (for example, 어미 might be of vital importance), if you can't master them well, you won't make Koreans understand your meanings, even if you speak out some scattered vocabularies.
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