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Japanese is Harder than Korean | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6231 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 25 of 57 14 May 2007 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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As someone who has studied both, I picked up Japenese much, much easier than Korean, and I probably spent more time studying and watching subbed Korean programs (every day) as opposed to Japanese ones (sometimes).
Korean writing is easier, but that's it. (For my native English speaking ears...) Korean has too many vowels that are too similar, and too many dipthongs. Was that "eui?" Is that pronounced like "eh?" Well then why didn't you just use an "eh" instead? Oh, because sometimes it's pronounced like "ee." Well, you wouldn't want to use "ee" then, unless it's actually "ee." And that doesn't even cover dipthongs... And it seemed like there were so many words/phrases/verb endings in Korean that were 90% vowels and dipthongs. I don't really remember any offhand, but I remember this concept for some reason. And it was very difficult for me to understand what was being said. And they are slurred together, too. Japanese has 5 vowels, on the other hand, and they're always the same. Sometimes "u" or "i" are kind of silent (ie. "des" instead of "de-su," or "skosh" instead of "sukoshi"). Korean's multiple forms of the same consonant were the bane of my existance. After years, I can sometimes tell if the speaker is saying "ka," "kka," or "k'a." However, that's only if they say it by itself. If it's in the middle of a word/sentence, I just guess which one they're saying. Japanese consonant pronunciation is incredibly simple and straightforward by comparison. It seems that everything that Japanese grammar does, Korean does in a more difficult manner. Japanese has one word to denote a subject. Korean has two (depending on if the previous word ends in a vowel or not... I think... honestly I haven't studied it in a while). Same thing for the object particle. I think in Korean it can be "i" or "ga," but in Japanese it's always "(w)o." But to be honest, I struggled so hard with understanding spoken Korean. I watched Korean TV shows (subtitled) every day. I listened to Korean CDs and followed along with the lyrics in the booklet, and I still couldn't tell what they were singing. Sometimes, I'd listen without reading the lyrics and try to write down what I thought they said... I'd be waaay off. But I never had this problem with Japanese. So, Korean's writing system is simpler than Japanese's, but I think that that's the ONLY aspect in which Korean is easier. Edited by IronFist on 14 May 2007 at 3:18pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6233 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 26 of 57 14 May 2007 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I haven't put much time into Korean, but I've dabbled with it a little. Like IronFist, I can't distinguish the sounds in it, and my attempts to reproduce them are clearly insanely far away from correct. Short of deciding to invest a lot of time listening and studying the phonology, I don't think I'd make serious progress with the spoken language.
On the other hand, Japanese pronunciation is a breeze. I was making myself understood with simple questions/phrases after a fairly small amount of study (despite studying extremely poorly because I had no idea of how to study a language on my own). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6344 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 27 of 57 15 May 2007 at 9:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Because I'm talking about the total number of hours to reach advanced proficiency here, in my book, that's enough. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| nhk9 Senior Member Canada Joined 6598 days ago 290 posts - 319 votes Speaks: English* | Message 28 of 57 16 May 2007 at 1:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I think the stumbling block that you are facing is pronunciation, as you emphasized the difficulty of that in Korean. Korean is indeed a harder language to pronounce, but not nearly as hard as many other languages, such as Chinese or Arabic. Comparing Korean to Chinese or Arabic is a bit of a digression, but my point is that it's not difficult for the foreigner to pronounce words in Korean with near native-proficiency in a short time (say a couple of months). The key is to have immersion, that is, to live in Korea for a sustained duration. Koreans like to shorten their words, and if one is not used to it, comprehension becomes difficult. For example, "I will phone you" in informal written Korean would be "Cheonhwa hae", but if you pay close attention to how most people say it, you might hear something like "Cheona ae". This is especially prevalent among youngsters nowadays. Another common example of contraction/irregularity in pronunciation would be 돼요 (to become), which in many cases may sound like 대요, especially in the Seoul dialect. Overall though, if you can pick up these irregularities, and study in Korea for maybe a few months, you will do just fine.
Just a note, the object particles in Korean are "eul/reul, not "i" or "ga". "i" or "ga" are subject particles. I find that it's easy to mistype if things are romanized though. Edited by nhk9 on 16 May 2007 at 1:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6231 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 29 of 57 18 May 2007 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Yes, but in my limited experience I feel that Korean grammar is more difficult, too. Many of the examples you listed with reference to pronunciation hit the nail on the head exactly :)
That's a very good example, and something that I did, indeed, have trouble with. I guess English does this a bit, too (going to --> gonna, probably --> prolly, want to --> wanna, etc.), but I can't compare it to English because English is my native language :) But it seems like Korean does this all the time, whenever there is more than one vowel together. And I also felt like Korean has shorter words than Japanese, which made it harder for me to understand. You know, it must just be a personal quirk with me. I studied Spanish and German in school, and while Spanish grammar is much easier than German, I have a much more difficult time understanding Spanish because they slur vowels and words together. In German, pretty much everything was distinct and obvious when listening to a speaker. Japanese is the same way. I guess my ears just have an easier time distinguishing consonants than vowels, and Korean is the most vowel-intensive language I've ever heard/seen.
Exactly. For me, "Cheonhwa hae" is already hard enough to understand. But then that contracted form and I'd be completely lost.
Another perfect example.
You're probably right. But I don't think I'll be going to Korea anytime soon :)
You know, I realized that after I posted that message, but I wasn't able to go back and edit it do to a weird firewall we have here at work (we only get a limited amount of bandwidth per day, after which all pages become blocked). Seriously tho, I agree with everything you said and every reason you gave. Nice post. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Walshy Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6736 days ago 335 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German | Message 30 of 57 19 May 2007 at 12:11am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I'll just chime in here and repeat my post from another thread. This is what the US Foreign Service Institute thinks:
From here.
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| Nea Vanille Diglot Newbie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5959 days ago 28 posts - 48 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC1 Studies: Korean | Message 31 of 57 06 February 2011 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I know this topic is really old, but I just stumbled upon it via google, and felt I actually had something substantial to add. So, I will.
I started learning Korean about 3 years ago, full-time. I'm still not that great, but I am probably at an advanced level now: I take university lectures in Korean, I speak only Korean in my daily life, I read the newspaper, etc. etc. I recently started learning Japanese, and it is easy. Of course it's easy - already knowing Korean means that most of the vocab and the grammar is already familiar to me. No surprise there. I just wanted to say this one thing: I actually think that the kanji used in Japanese are your best friend past a certain level. Because with Korean? Not knowing the hanja pretty much means you will never read fluency. You don't need to know how to write them or even read them that well, but you do have to understand where certain syllables come from, and what they mean, before you can process half of what is written in a text book. It is my firm belief that the kanji in Japanese are a stumbling block in the beginning, but a huge help once you've reached an advanced level. Kanji immediately give you a hint as to what the heck is meant (usually - sure some words have no real connection to what the kanji they're composed of mean individually, but from what I've seen, this is not that common). So in other words, once you reach an advanced level, the problem with Japanese is figuring out how to pronounce unknown words; the problem with Korean is figuring out the meaning, full stop. I'm not going to say that Korean is harder than Japanese. Japanese will always be easier for me to learn because I learned Korean first, and I don't know how hard it would be if I had learned Japanese first. But I just wanted to point out, as an advanced learner of Korean, that the lack of visual clues in Korean words (especially in text books and newspapers that are just littered with Sino-Korean words, and I took Economics in Korean last semester) can be a huge pain in the ass. I maintain that Korean reading/writing is undeniably easier to learn in the beginning - easier to learn how to read/write simple e-mails or letters from your friend - but that once you get to a high enough level, it becomes quite debatable. Personally, I have not gotten around to learning a good deal of hanja. I certainly don't know as many as the advanced learner of Japanese, and I can't write them worth a damn -- recognition is enough for Korean, after all -- but I've still had to familiarize myself with a lot of them to be able to understand the lectures and text books I do now. I don't know which is harder, I just wanted to put out my personal experience here. :-) Edited by Nea Vanille on 06 February 2011 at 9:45pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5242 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 32 of 57 07 February 2011 at 12:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Even though I am a native Korean speaker, I think I can agree with that from a non-Korean speaker point of view. The Korean grammar is apparently more complex than that of Japanese for the most part, but from what I've seen they weren't all that different. The need for Chinese characters, however, is virtually zero in Korean and hopefully it will be completely gone in the next few decades. However, Chinese characters will persist in Japanese it seems. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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