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Japanese is Harder than Korean | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6359 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 41 of 57 06 October 2011 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||
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For the purpose of this thread, and imo any meaningful discussion of relative language difficulty, difficulty = time
required to learn. Unless you happen to be a polyglot from Ireland who likes to make up stuff to rant about, of course. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4987 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 42 of 57 07 October 2011 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have watched Korean drama about a surgeon lady, and I have heard they were using a word 신약 meaning new medicine.
I wonder why they didn't use 새로운 약? I sometimes get an idea Koreans and Japanese simply make new words at random using hanja. would old medicine be 구약? It seems like a language in a language. 광부지언 what does it mean? Word's of madman. So it does help a lot. but I agree that you have to learn it together with vocabulary. You can use some online dictionaries to get the hanja. For me it's easier to learn Korean with knowing Chinese, but I don't know how would it be without learning some Chinese first. So I would advise to learn Chines/Japanese or even Classical Chinese in order to get better in Korean. A little like learning Latin to know English better. Eventually analising the words you have learned. It may be easier to remember 대학 as "university", if you know that it means big learning". I am always surprised at the rich East Asian vocabulary. I am sometimes trying to make up my own words for fun, only to find they already exist. I was wondering: is there a verb for falling from a horse? if you can say 승마 meaning to embark on a horse can you use 낙마 for falling? Well, I was right, such a word really exists. So I would suggest you learn hanja together with words, as it will show you how to use it and stuff. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5627 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 43 of 57 14 November 2011 at 11:15am | IP Logged | ||
I've wondered this in the past and I recently came across the answer when I finally began learning Hanja the other day (don't quote me on it though). 신 is Chinese origin and so is 약. 새로운 is Korean. It's not common to make new words by combining a Chinese origin word with a Korean origin word but it's very common to combine Chinese-Chinese or Korean-Korean to make words hence why 신약 would be used whereas 새로운 약 would not be. I learnt this from Miho Choo's 'Handbook of Korean Vocabulary' so I'd advise you to pick that up if you haven't already. Regarding the Hanja debate, I didn't want to learn Hanja originally (felt like the long way around) but I'm already seeing the benefits of having begun learning it. It's helping me remember the vocabulary better as the individual sounds/words now have meaning (believe me, you'll never forget the Korean word for 'mongrel' or 'meteorite' again). Imagine you were learning English and you learnt 'psyche'. Not a very common word, but from that word you could then immediately learn 'psycho', 'psychology/ist', 'psychiatry/ist' and you could possibly guess 'psychometric' and 'psychotherapy' if you were to come across them. Is this necessary to learn English/can English people speak Ancient Greek? No. Does it help? Yes. If you (like I) have problems remembering Korean vocabulary, learn Hanja. If you remember Korean words easily then don't bother if you don't want to. (That's right. I learnt Chinese characters to make learning Korean easier. How disturbing is that?) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ojorolla Diglot Groupie France Joined 4774 days ago 90 posts - 130 votes Speaks: French*, English | Message 44 of 57 15 November 2011 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I understand what you mean by 구약, but it wasn't in the Korean dictionary I referred to.
새로운 약... it makes sense. 신약 roughly is to 새로운 약 what arithmetic is to science of number. And about Hanja... As a native Korean speaker, I think it doesn't really help me learn new Korean vocabulary. I already know enough Korean words so as to make new ones just stick in my brain like magic. Also I think it's more important to know in which contexts they're used, which Hanja is not very useful for. To me, the usefulness of Hanja lies in the fact that they help understand old texts & records, and some special fields like medicine or law. Still, the latter actually requires very small subsets of characters. Or you see the same characters all over. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| howtwosavealif3 Newbie United States Joined 4295 days ago 16 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English* | Message 45 of 57 03 November 2012 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just wanted to say that the people who wrote I watched x hours of subtitled korean tv or i watched subtitled korean tv for x number of years and then complain that they didn't improve that much should not be surprised. It's a natural result. How lazy and unrealistic can you get ? That result will happen with any language. How many anime fans are out there that have watched hundreds or thousands of hours of subbed anime and only know a couple words? MANY. Also their ability to "hear" Japanese is not developed much either as opposed to if they watched the x number of hours of anime without subtitles. I know from personal experience that my hearing with Japanese did not improve much just from watching subbed anime. Only after significant exposure to Japanese without subtitles or japanese subtitles or japanese text they put on the screen, I got used to the sounds of Japanese. I personally don't think it really helps or counts unless you're watching it raw or with korean subtitles. I believe in the concepts in ajatt to some extent. If you're watching the documentary or the talk/variety shows, they do put text on the screen or write out what the person is saying sometimes so it is like subtitles. Obviously, if you're watching it subbed, you're not paying attention to the korean as much as you want to convince yourself that you are AND it's covering up the korean text on the screen. Like I said before, it doesn't help you develop your ear for the language. I think even if you limited yourself to only looking up words that they put up on the screen (since some words are hard to look up from the way it's spelled plus you might waste your time rewinding and trying to catch what they say and then be off by a whole consonant or vowel and then never find it in the dictionary in the end anyway), you can still learn a lot of vocabulary and grammar. Edited by howtwosavealif3 on 03 November 2012 at 8:31pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4677 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 46 of 57 03 November 2012 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | ||
My personal experience is very different. When I watched English-subbed Korean TV I'm more likely to pick up new vocabulary. I read the subtitle first and then listen for the Korean speech. At an intermediate level I've started to watch most shows unsubbed and now it's very effective for improving listening comprehension, but at the beginning stages I'd just get lost without English subs and tune out from trying to understand some of the Korean pretty soon. Of course it would be silly to think you can learn a language like Korean or Japanese from just watching TV, whether that may be subbed or unsubbed. Without an understanding of the grammar I'm convinced it doesn't work - or maybe you'll figure out something after 20 years... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Odysseus Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4800 days ago 19 posts - 28 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Mandarin | Message 47 of 57 05 November 2012 at 4:56am | IP Logged | ||
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Speaking of 구약, from a Hanja dictionary:
구약 (救藥): 병을 고치는 약(藥) Now, that's not the 구 the asker intended, but it highlights one of the difficulties of just slapping together new words using Hanja in a verbal context. If, on the other hand, you were to write "구약 (舊藥)" in a composition or something, I bet most educated Koreans would get your meaning. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| howtwosavealif3 Newbie United States Joined 4295 days ago 16 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English* | Message 48 of 57 06 November 2012 at 12:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Oh I'm gonna put 구약 in my anki deck. Thanks guys. But for that, I'm taking the one with the meaning of a promise that was said by mouth. 口約]
[명사·하다형 타동사]口約;口頭で約束すること;口約束。 But anyways the thing with korean is even if something had 10-15 possible meanings, depending on the context it's really obvious, at least to a native/fluent Korean person, which meaning is intended or makes sense. Edited by howtwosavealif3 on 06 November 2012 at 12:42am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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