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I read this entire thread and enjoyed it thoroughly. I agree with everything Kitchen.Sink has said.

There are too many posts in this thread that begin with “I’ve never studied Korean, but [I don’t think it is as hard as people say].”

Re: the comparisons with Japanese. I started studying Japanese and Korean within about a year of each other, when I was about 15 years old, so my brain was in about the same level of development. I am not exaggerating when I say that I made more progress in 6 months of Japanese than in 2 years of Korean. I fully admit that part of this is due in fact to the lack of good Korean learning materials. I bought at least a dozen Korean courses in the mid 90s and nearly all of them were worthless for many reasons which I have mentioned in other threads so don’t want to repeat here.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that I found some Korean learning materials that were decent, and I have found exactly 3, which I will list here:

1) Pimsleur Korean - the 30 lesson course. In the mid 90s they released a 10 lesson (or maybe it was 30) course that was weird. It was SUPER formal, and didn’t “sound like Korean.” Pimsleur has recently released level 1 and 2 30 lesson courses that, *gasp*, actually sound like the Korean you hear spoken on TV and on the street!

I know many people hate Pimsleur, but I find it invaluable because it gets you thinking in the target language. For me personally, it rewires my brain. Who cares if you don’t learn very much vocabulary? It sets the foundation for your new language in a way that no other program can. In fact, I commonly hear people who have learned through Pimsleur making comments like “natives assume I know more than I do because my pronunciation is so good and my speech is so fluid.”

2) Elementary Korean by Ross King and Jaehoon Yeon (comes with a CD)

3) Integrated Korean by Young-Mee Cho, Hyo Sang Lee, Carol Schulz and Ho-Min Sohn (this is a whole series with like 6 or 8 books and I believe .mp3s are available online)

Even with updated learning materials, even with watching Korean TV for hours a day for years, even with listening to Korean music every day, even with talking to native speakers when I can, progress in Korean moves at a snails pace.

Many people say “Japaneses is harder than Korean because of the kanji!!!” I guarantee you they have never studied both languages. I think memorizing all the kanji, their various pronunciations, and getting used to the annoying fact that Japanese doesn’t put spaces in between words, can all be accomplished much quicker than learning to understand spoken Korean.

Sure, Japanese may not have very many sounds, but they’re all distinct from one another. When a Japanese person says something, you know what they said. When you say something in Japanese, they know what you said. There aren’t 4 consonants that all sound the same (to you, not to them), a bunch of other consonants that change into other consonants depending on where they are in a word or because the speaker just feels like pronouncing them differently, and there aren’t 20+ vowels that just get slurred together any which way or dropped entirely. (I know Japanese has consonants that change in compound words, such as initial K becoming G when it’s the second half of a compound word, or T becoming D in the same instance. This is easy and predictable, and not what I’m talking about in Korean).

Korean has so many one and two syllable homonyms which would be bad enough in itself, but you don’t even know what word is being said because the initial and middle consonants could sound like one thing but they are actually one of 8 different options that you just misunderstood. The vowels might sound like one thing to you but you’re actually wrong. You can’t look up in a dictionary what you think you heard because it will require looking up 10 or 20 different possibilities for each possible consonant and vowel you may have heard in each possible location even though the word was only two syllables long!

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that half of the language will sound like homonyms to you, even though to Koreans they are entirely separate words. There is no equivalent of the same magnitude in English. Some foreigners learning English can’t hear the difference between short i (like in “slip”) and long E (like in “sleep”). So if you say “slip” they may not understand which word you said without context, but in context it would be pretty easy. If someone brushes their teeth and said “I need to sleep,” it’s pretty obvious which word they mean even if you don’t understand when they say it. Now, imagine that instead of only two options, “slip” and “sleep,” there are 8 other words that sound exactly the same that it could be. You could still get them from context, right? Now, imagine that half the words in the sentence being spoken have that same issue, each with 8 other words they could be. It becomes like an elaborate probability tree in your head. Now, imagine that the pronunciation of them changes at will, so “slip,” “sleep,” and the other 6 words that sound alike could also be pronounced as “sli” or “sleeb” or “slob” or “slop” or “slurp” “sl” or “leep” or “lip” or “sleip,” or “slp,” or “lp” or “s” or “p” or “monkey,” or “dishwasher,” or some other variation that may either be close to the original word or completely different.   And figure out which word it is quickly because Koreans speak quickly. And if you mishear something, well, every word in Korean is just one letter away from being a completely different word.

And even if you manage to isolate that word, if you’re like “cool, I heard him say “slp.” Good luck looking it up in a dictionary because it’s not even spelled that way.

Now I know it’s not this hard for everyone. Some people in this thread have said they are at an intermediate level of Korean, and that’s great. I’m impressed and jealous :) I don’t doubt that for some people, it just “clicks.” It’s like how some people can learn to play an instrument easily and other people study for years and still aren’t very good. But if there was one instrument that was considered to be hard, even amongst musicians who were already skilled at other instruments, that would be like the Korean of the instrument world.

I assume that most people on this forum are better at learning languages than the average person. And even if they’re not, the fact that they are interested enough to join a language learning forum would give them an advantage. So the people here who say Korean is hard aren’t idiots who just “don’t know how to learn a language” or “don’t have a good strategy.”

But the people who haven’t studied it really can’t comment about how it’s “not that hard” because it’s basically the same as people watching UFC on TV and acting like they would be able to beat the guy who is fighting. On paper it all makes sense and is easy to analyze. Armchair quarterbacks.

Kitchen.Sink, even though half the replies in this thread were flaming you, I agree with you 100%.

Korean is hard. It’s so hard it’s off-putting. I love it, though. I love the way it sounds. I like the way it looks written. I enjoy watching Korean TV and listening to Korean music. But every time I have begun to study it over the last 15 years, I become discouraged because I don’t make any progress. As pointed out in this thread, listening to Korean TV doesn’t help comprehension. I have a great “feel” for the language and its intonation (unlike some posts in this thread have suggested, I think Korean has a very apparent intonation). I am always drawn to the language. But in all seriousness, it’s just a massive pile of fail every time I try to learn it. If I didn’t love it, I would’ve been discouraged 15 years ago.

I find that I do better when I slur everything myself. I try to sound like how I would imagine someone on TV saying it if they were pretending to be drunk, like you see on dramas sometimes.

In Japanese, I learn a new word and I remember it. It’s a clear, crisp word.

In Korean, I learn a new word and forget it 15 seconds later. It’s not clear. It’s not crisp. There are 50 other words that sound just like it, that are written almost exactly like it, and that probably all sound the same when spoken. Well, they all sound the same to me at least.

It’s not the grammar. It’s not the formality or honorifics. It’s not the particles. It’s not SOV order. It’s not the dropping of subjects. Japanese does all of that and it doesn’t really give me a problem. It’s speaking/pronunciation/listening/slurring and the fact that every word is so similar to every other word that I can’t keep them apart in my brain. I can’t even remember them.

In Japanese, each word is a sculpture made out of diamond. It has hard edges. It is distinct from every other sculpture.

In Korean, each word is a semi-formed sculpture made of clay. It’s soft and pliable and looks like every other sculpture and if you look at it wrong it will change shape and get all mushed up.

But the clay has drugs in it so I can’t stay away.

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Edited by IronFist on 28 January 2012 at 7:35pm
14 persons have voted this message useful

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Continuing my “diamond and clay” analogy from my previous post, every word I learn in Japanese fits perfectly into its own compartment in my brain. I know where it goes, and I know where it is, and I can usually find the one I need.

In Korean, since the words are all half-finished sculptures made out of clay, when I learn a new word and store it in my brain, it just gets squished in with all the other clay, and then when I need that word, I can’t find it, because it’s not distinct from any of the other words. I break off a piece of clay and mold it into what I think is the correct shape and think “maybe this is it” but alas, it is not.

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