The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

General discussion about learning languages
User avatar
leosmith
Brown Belt
Posts: 1341
Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2016 10:06 pm
Location: Seattle
Languages: English (N)
Spanish (adv)
French (int)
German (int)
Japanese (int)
Korean (int)
Mandarin (int)
Portuguese (int)
Russian (int)
Swahili (int)
Tagalog (int)
Thai (int)
x 3099
Contact:

The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

Postby leosmith » Sat Oct 14, 2017 1:50 pm

For a long time now I’ve wanted to answer the issues brought up in the old HTLAL thread The ‘I Hate Korean’ Thread from a position of more experience and knowledge than I had in my first go around with it 6.5 years ago. I hope it’s alright to post this here. If not, please let me know and I’ll post it on HTLAL.

The thread was mostly a debate about whether or not Korean was the hardest language in the world for a native English speaker, or at least whether it’s harder than Japanese and Mandarin. I always felt that Japanese and Mandarin must be harder than Korean, but I knew many forum members thought otherwise, particularly a number of those who had studied Korean, so I used the desire to find the answer to this question to help me learn the language. The thread gave me a lot of motivation and I’m grateful for that.

I just reached a level roughly equivalent to B2 in Korean. It took me 13 months. I don’t want to make it sound like it was a piece of cake. There are some major caveats. I put in 2300 hours in the first 12 months at home, followed by a leisurely month in Seoul. I’ve reached B2 in Japanese and Mandarin before. I’m an experienced learner with 9 languages under my belt, etc. But still, it only took 13 months, and I wanted to reply to this interesting thread since I finally feel qualified.
Kitchen.Sink wrote: I am highly amused by how you not only cherry pick my words and phrases to conveniently leave out the ends of my sentences, the part where I state that Korean is not difficult for those reasons though they might seem to be to the outsider, but I am also highly amused by how pedantic your tone is without even having studied Korean yourself.

IronFist wrote: 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]."

IronFist wrote: 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.

Point taken, but now I’ve studied Korean to a B2 level, and my opinion hasn’t changed.
Kitchen.Sink wrote:After months of thinking about it, the reason why I find Korean so difficult is not the complex grammar or the massive list of vocabulary -- it is how Korean is spoken. I cannot identify word boundaries. This is a subtle point that most language learners overlook because it comes to us naturally. "Je m'appelle Francois", to hear this spoken in French is not difficult. Even a man who knows no French can hear the word boundaries, and by that, I mean, even if he does not know what "je" or "m'appelle" means, he can identify them as words.

With Korean, however, words blend into one another and sounds, very important sounds, get stifled under the breath of speakers who can mysteriously hear through all the mumbling. I have listened to hundreds upon hundreds of hours of Korean radio. Literally, I am not exaggerating this claim one bit. I have been listening to Korean news radio nearly everyday for three or four years. And even after all that time and effort I still can only make out a few words per day. That's right, a few words. Not sentences, not excerpts: mere words. I have listened to Japanese and Mandarin news radio for a fraction of that amount and can occasionally pick out sentences and can get the gist of what is being said overall. Not so with Korean. With Korean, I am almost as clueless as the day I started learning the language, so many years ago.

IronFist wrote:The problem with Korean, at least for me, is that it is spoken so quickly and in such a way that my brain, for some bizarre reason, just does not process precisely what is being said. Even with ample amounts of exposure. I have never encountered a language where I can listen to a sentence two dozen times and still not be entirely sure of the fundamental sounds that were spoken. It's bizarre, and it's something you cannot understand until you try to learn Korean for yourself.


Although they aren’t as distinct as Japanese word boundaries, I don’t find Korean word boundaries to be particularly problematic. I think the problems above can be solved by the same things that improve general listening. For example lots of normal listening and intensive listening while concurrently practicing all the other skills.
Kitchen.Sink wrote:With Korean, however, the mind has no foundation to settle on. For instance, the phrase "jaedongeul arabwa" can be emphasized in a seemingly endless number of ways, especially as one word bleeds into another without the slightest shift in emphasis or tone.
JAEdongeularabwa
jaedongEULaraBWA
jaedoneularaBWA

Balliballi wrote:the lack of intonation makes it hard to work out when a word ends and a new one starts. A typical Korean sentence sounds like a row of twenty-odd syllables that sound exactly alike in rhythm, stress and inflection. English is different because there is quite a lot of intonation in the language. In Korean, every syllable is given the same weight. So the effect is rather like a computer speaking - there is a staccato-like quality to the speech. Think of robots talking and you will know what I mean. The speech sounds very flat.

Balliballi wrote:News broadcasts are the worst. The newscasters speak in a very unemotional and even tone which makes the problem of distinguishing separate words even more problematic.

Because of the lack of intonation, you only know they have finished the sentence when they have actually finished it. With many other languages, there are clues that the sentence is coming to an end - a rise or a drop in pitch etc.

As in any language, there are prosody, rhythm, stress patterns at the sentence level that change the meaning or nuance of the sentence. Korean isn’t unusually difficult in this aspect imo. In the beginning, one should learn pronunciation at the sentence level by listening to and repeating lots of sentences.
Kitchen.Sink wrote:This does not even include the inexplicable shifts in sounds that Koreans like to perform as the whim strikes them. For instance, the "bwa" at the end of that sentence (봐) will sometimes get pronounced as "bwa", others times as "ba" (바). There is not necessarily a dialect that does this change consistently, there is no rule that you can learn, it's just something Koreans do, where if it's easier for their tongue to say it that way, they say it that way. To a native Korean speaker, the mind can intuitively figure out the irregularity. To someone studying Korean, it's a nightmare. The Koreans do this all the time. When women try to sound cute, they will sometimes pronounce "do" (도), meaning "also", as "du" (두), which could mean any number of things, depending on what came before it. They don't always do this consistently, sometimes they will even use these different forms in the very same sentence!

Balliballi wrote:The word for "prisoner" in Korean is "죄인". I thought it was spelled as "제인" just from the way the word was pronounced, and I, of course, could not find the word in the dictionary, which was annoying as I wanted to know how the word was written in Korean and not only how it was pronounced.

Another word I had this problem with was "귀신" (ghost). I thought it was spelled "기신" and I spent many frustrating minutes trying to find this word in the dictionary, which I ended up not doing.

Whenever there is a complex vowel that starts out with what would be a sort of “w” sound in English, it often gets reduced to drop the w in colloquial speech. For example, 와 – 아, 외 – 에, 위- 이, etc.

From what I’ve been told by tutors, there was some sort of spelling revision a while back, and many words that used to contain 우 got rewritten using 오. Many of these words still get pronounced 우 in colloquial speech.

Although these are annoying at first, they are very widespread, and our confusion resolves itself over time. I wouldn’t call it a nightmare.
Bao wrote:As far as I can tell, the m has roughly the same sound value each time in 'Moi, je m'appelle Armand', whereas the Korean m changes a lot depending on whether it is between vowels, a vowel or a consonant, at the beginning or end of a word group; and whether it is spoken quickly or slowly. When it's spoken quickly or between vowels, it is so short that it gets a nasal quality that sounds very much like a b to me. I can tell apart and produce m, b, p' and bb, but to me that's a four way distinction of sounds that do not match the phoneme inventory of any of my other languages, neither in their boundaries nor in their interaction. And that's just one group of sounds, there are several.

IronFist wrote: 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.


These consonant problems are very manageable, provided you learn pronunciation at the phoneme level, and at the word level you understand the rules of thumb for change in pronunciation due to position. If you do this, listen a lot, do a lot of production, make an effort to always follow the rules when you produce then it will all work out.

Regarding the vowels getting slurred together or dropped, sure it happens, but to characterize the whole language that way, or to even call it a major problem for the learner is an exaggeration imo. I’ve done intensive listening and dug down into the reason I can’t understand stuff and can honestly say this issue has never made me miss the meaning of an entire sentence. It’s usually a word or two, sometimes a clause, but the sentence is still understandable. Granted there are some speakers who do this a lot, but most speakers do it infrequently.
galindo wrote:I've watched a few music videos in Korean with phonetic subtitles, and it's amazing how what I hear doesn't match up with what I see at all.

That’s a Romanization problem. Learn how it’s Romanized to solve this, although you’re better off not using it imo.
oolong tea wrote:You think that's hell, consider this: I purchased a novel, Alice in Wonderland in Korean. Now, it was translated from the said original but whenever I glance at the original, I'm stunned to see how little I understood. Plus, it's a book about nonsense, when it does make "sense", it never did. (Think about it)

That’s a reading comprehension problem. Vocabulary and grammar review are in order.
GREGORG4000 wrote: Vocabulary is killing me."강장", "건장", "정종", "공장", "전공", "간장", "조간", "존경", 등

IronFist wrote:Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that half of the language will sound like homonyms to you

Imo that would be inaccurate. If you learn the pronunciation up front as I suggested above this problem is greatly reduced, context and getting accustomed with the language does the rest.
IronFist wrote:Good luck looking it up in a dictionary because it's not even spelled that way.

There are only a few ways to spell a word phonetically, so this is not a big issue. It’s much easier to spell than Japanese, for example.
IronFist wrote: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."

Nobody is calling anyone an idiot. Based on the items you brought up I believe your strategy is flawed.
IronFist wrote:taking a break from Korean means forgetting what you know.

This could be true of any language depending on how low your level is and how long the break is.
IronFist wrote:listening to Korean TV doesn't help comprehension

I disagree. It takes a very long time to notice progress, but it certainly happens.
Balliballi wrote:Koreans tend to speak fast - very fast.

No faster than any other language, imo.
Balliballi wrote:Korean is very very hard on the ear. It is a grating language very different to say French or Farsi which have very soothing and elegant sounds that draw your ear to it. Korean is even more harsh sounding than German - actually that's not a good comparison - I like the sound of German, it is very pleasing to the ear - there are very nice sharp precise sounds that make it easy to listen to, a bit like the Japanese language which has these sharply defined syllables and a delivery which is precise and rhythmic.

C’mon.
crafedog wrote:Try saying 영화 to a native. They'll try correcting you as 영와

Imo, this is extremely unlikely. If you pronounce it 영화 they’ll understand you and probably leave you alone. If they feel the urge to make you more native like for some reason, they’ll probably tell you to say 영아.
IronFist wrote:N's and D's sound the same. For months, I thought the word for "yes" was "de."

This is just a nasal issue, one that most students get used to very early on.
IronFist wrote:For most of Pimsleur Korean I, I would have bet money that the word for "weather" was "dal-si" (dal-shi). Nope! It's "nal-ssi" (nal-sshi).

This is one of the reasons why I recommend using a transcript with Pimsleur, even if you have to make your own.
IronFist wrote:there are no rules, or that rules are extremely vague and anything goes.

I agree that there are often optional ways to pronounce things, but the options are limited, and you get used to them. I suspect there are rules for almost everything, but sometimes they are hard to find, and sometimes they are complicated enough to not bother with. As long as one studies and is diligent about pronunciation, these difficulties disappear with time. They aren’t a big time draw, just more of a temporary frustration.
IronFist wrote: It wasn't until the early 2000s that I found some Korean learning materials that were decent

These days Korean resources are excellent.
IronFist wrote:Many people say "Japanese is harder than Korean because of the kanji!!!" I guarantee you they have never studied both languages.

I have, and this statement is certainly true for me, and I believe it would be true for most westerners.
Kitchen.Sink wrote:
leosmith wrote:I've had several friends who have studied Mandarin and Korean. They have said that Mandarin is harder all around, and especially in the beginning, citing much harder pronunciation. Actually, this forum is the only place I know that thinks Korean is the hardest language.

Your friends are free to have their opinions, but Korean being the hardest language for someone of a Western background is not at all a claim relegated to people on these forums.

Here's an interview with Barry Farber. Third question.What's the hardest language you've ever attacked? For two different reasons, Finnish and Korean.http://meadowparty.com/farber.html

Read what Professor Arguelles, a polyglot who used to post on these forums had to say.http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=10

The Defense Language Institute.Korean is the hardest language here, apparently it is 75 weeks long now, and they are trying to make it a Cat V language.http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/education/a/dliarticle_5.htm

Here's a scientific study done on how it takes native Korean speaking children longer to absorb certain aspects of their grammar (up to five years of age) than the children of any other language.
--->Lee, H. and Wexler, K.: 1987, 'The acquisition of reflexives and pronouns in Korean', Paper delivered at the 12th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.

Another polyglot on Korean.
The average person, normal people who haven't dedicated their lives to being language and martial arts study-monks, would imagine that learning Chinese is about the hardest things someone could do. But two weeks into my study of Korean, I began to suspect that Korean was harder. Six months later, when I could read and write with ease, and possessed thousands of vocabulary words, and countless grammatical structures, but still couldn't order off a menu, I was convinced, Korean is the hardest of the ten languages I have studied.
http://www.asiantribune.com/index.php?q=node/39 36


There's plenty more of this out there on the internet. Korean is considered to be the hardest language there is, not just by polyglots, but even by language learning institutions. It is not at all isolated to these forums.

Thanks – you make me feel superhuman!
Last edited by leosmith on Sun Oct 15, 2017 3:06 pm, edited 2 times in total.
11 x
https://languagecrush.com/reading - try our free multi-language reading tool

User avatar
leosmith
Brown Belt
Posts: 1341
Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2016 10:06 pm
Location: Seattle
Languages: English (N)
Spanish (adv)
French (int)
German (int)
Japanese (int)
Korean (int)
Mandarin (int)
Portuguese (int)
Russian (int)
Swahili (int)
Tagalog (int)
Thai (int)
x 3099
Contact:

Re: The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

Postby leosmith » Sat Oct 14, 2017 2:25 pm

Haksaeng wrote:In defiance of the thread title, I LOVE Korean. It's so much fun, even though I suck at it.

druckfehler wrote: Strange, I love Korean exactly for the reasons you guys find it frustrating.

IronFist wrote:
Minya wrote: I don't think Korean is hard if you love it.

False. I love Korean. It's why I keep coming back to it over the last 15 years. But it's still hard. Much harder than languages I've studied that I didn't really like.

Here's a little Kpop song, complete with subtitles, that suits your love-hate relationship with Korean imo:
[MV] Mad Clown(매드클라운) _ Fire(화) (Feat. Jinsil(진실) Of Mad Soul Child)
0 x
https://languagecrush.com/reading - try our free multi-language reading tool

nooj
Brown Belt
Posts: 1257
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 12:59 pm
Languages: english (n)
x 3358

Re: The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

Postby nooj » Mon Oct 16, 2017 1:54 am

Korean is one of my native languages and honestly, I don't see why it would be in and of itself more difficult for an English speaker to learn than say, Arabic or Finnish. I know that's not fair as I'm a native speaker, but honestly, pronunciation and comprehension is a classic problem for all learners of any language. I mean listening to French people speak to each other honestly shits me, and that's supposed to be an 'easy' language for English speakers.

Korean has a relatively large amount of learning material for its size, there is a diaspora everywhere around the world for you to talk with in person, a massive amount of internet presence and so you could live your life on the internet without needing to use English, and the media content is enormous - literature, movies, music, tv shows. And if you live in Korea, the advantages are multiplied 100 fold. There's really little excuse for people not to speak passable Korean after a good five or six years living there.

Now what I'd like to see is more resources available on the dialects, because the standard bores me to tears. But it' really something you can only learn once you're there I suppose.
8 x
زندگی را با عشق
نوش جان باید کرد

4valor
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Oct 16, 2017 11:37 pm
Languages: English (N), Korean (B1)
x 6

Re: The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

Postby 4valor » Mon Oct 16, 2017 11:46 pm

Hi Leo, been following your Korean log for a while, very inspiring.

I am not sure about the purpose of this thread though. It's pretty subjective and with all due respect, most people would unquestionably take the word of Professor Arguelles over your own (given that he states he has studied Korean for 9 years vs your 13 months). Being B1 Korean myself, perhaps it is harder to progress on to the later levels than some of the other more difficult languages? Or perhaps the difficulty is specifically related to listening/speaking, where I suspect Korean may be the hardest.

Also, kind of off topic, but I have been meaning to ask if you felt Pimsleur was particular useful in your Korean journey?
1 x

Sayonaroo
Green Belt
Posts: 256
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2017 12:13 am
Languages: English(N), Japanese -fluent?, Korean - advanced?, Spanish (b1?)
Language Log: http://choronghi.wordpress.com
x 319
Contact:

Re: The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

Postby Sayonaroo » Tue Oct 17, 2017 12:38 am

leosmith wrote: IronFist wrote:
Good luck looking it up in a dictionary because it's not even spelled that way.

There are only a few ways to spell a word phonetically, so this is not a big issue. It’s much easier to spell than Japanese, for example.




Maybe you misunderstood what the person wrote? He's talking about looking up a word you hear.

I think it's easier to look up words in Japanese because unlike Korean they don't have multiple ways to spell words since they don't use an alphabet. For Japanese i could just look up the hiragana (select starts with or exact match) while for Korean I'd have to type out every possible spelling but it could very well be a word you cannot spell until you actually know it (in this case google might be helpful with its suggested search terms but probably not if you're way off-base).

I found Japanese to be much easier to learn than Korean precisely because the Japanese language uses chinese characters and especially because there are some very cool free programs and tools available for japanese that aren't available for korean like rikai-sama, yomi-chan, anki plugins, remember the kanji, tae kim's guid eto japanese grammar, etc etc.

Can you imagine learning Korean without having first learned some Japanese? I think that would be super inefficient because of all the sinowords

by the way here is a collection of my favorite posts from that thread. That thread is incredibly long, hilarious, and cathartic as a korean learner.
http://tsukinofune.tumblr.com/day/2012/11/02

I liked some posts about the hanja. I will paste

ennime wrote:
Honestly, these arguments around Hanja or no Hanja… if learning and
knowing hanja is a necessity to get true fluency, then there is an entire generation of
Koreans who don’t speak their own language fluent (plus the majority of north
koreans)…


Come on now, one’s saying that Koreans are less fluent in their own native tongue
because they don’t use hanja… Just that the lack of hanja makes it more difficult for
learners of the language to figure out and remember unfamiliar words. I’m not
sure what’s so controversial about this statement.

I have never studied Korean, but in Japanese I am sure that the kanji makes reading
really smooth for me even if I haven’t studied many words on the page before. On the
occasions that I’ve had to read something in hiragana/romaji, it was a real struggle to
figure out unfamiliar words based on context alone and tell apart all those homonyms
(e.g. my dictionary shows over 20 possibilities for the pronunciation 「しょうこう」.)
As a few before me have said, learning kanji is a big hurdle that, once you clear it,
pays dividends in the long-run.

Korean seems to have less homonyms than Japanese in its Sinetic loanwords, due to a
richer phoneme inventory. So I imagine that this would be less of a problem in Korean
than in Japanese, and therefore learning the hanja would provide a smaller payoff for
the learner’s efforts . But
posts on this thread by Korean learners suggest that homonyms are still is a great
problem nonetheless. So that observation combined with my experience with kanji in
Japanese makes me very ready to believe the Professor’s assertion that the hanja are
needed for a learner to gain a strong command of the vocabulary. Particularly,
his report of hitting a brick wall with regard to vocabulary, and then his vocab
acquisition “snowballing” after he learned the hanja immediately rang some bells with
me as a Japanese learner and teacher. When Korean learners claim the hanja aren’t
necessary for a learner, and appear to be baffled by the Professor’s statement, I
wonder if it’s because they simply have never tried. Of course, this is just
speculation, and I’d be interested in hearing from a Korean learner who has learned at
least a few hundred hanja, who doesn’t feel satisfied that it was necessary.

Those who are averse to learning the hanja in Korean usually say “Nobody uses them
anymore”, “You can get along just fine without them”, “Even the native speakers hardly
know them, and they seem to be speaking just fine”. Again, I haven’t studied Korean,
but I think that the needs of an L2 learner are not quite the same as those of a native
speaker. When Asians learn English, they often have to study Greek and Latin roots.
What percent of (non-language geek) native English speakers can tell you that the root
of “dictionary” and “contradict” has to do with speaking? Do we even need to know? But
for a learner of English without a history in that tradition, they’re a great help in
acquiring new vocabulary.

Edited by Lucky Charms on 14 February 2011 at 4:27am
4 persons have voted this message useful

—-

In my opinion, you can achieve true fluency without knowing hanja, but you’ll need an (for foreign students) unrealistic amount of exposure. If a Korean native could, at one time in history, learn it in 20 years of full exposure while covering a wide range of topics at school, doesn’t mean a foreign learner of the language can do the same. Even then, I can’t imagine handling some professional topics without hanja knowledge.

I resisted learning hanja for a long time, even though I learned a lot of kanji when studying Japanese. I found it hard to learn something you never see. Hanja are always there, but hidden like behind a curtain of hangeul. So you don’t have that automatic reinforcement you have when you read Japanese and reinforce the kanji.
What got me study them in the end, was 1. those rare sinokorean words you only encounter once a year or so, they are often so much easier to remember if you know the hanja or know at least one of the hanja and 2. without hanja it’s hard to distinguish between similar sinokorean words. There are so many words that somewhat mean the same but differ a little in connotation. Hanja helps to keep these words apart.


I don’t know if learning Korean is harder than learning Japanese.
But in my case it was a lot more confusing and frustrating. So maybe it’s not more difficult but for some people it feels like it is, because of the confusion and frustration.



I never understood how Hanja really help that much in the learning process.
When you get to a certain point in your studies where it becomes necessary to
distinguish hard words/very similar words/ words with the same roots, then you’re
already in my experience at the point where you can tell what nuance the words in
question have without knowing any separate system of writing.

What is 한정, and how it is different from 제한, 제한 from 제약, etc?
This is something you could learn by going through the 1800 or so hanja that some
generations learn…
Or you could simply go by what you already know based on everything you’ve seen that
has the character 제 in it, and the same for 정, and 한, etc.

Simply thinking about that has always given me whatever nuance or understanding was
needed.
Also I get a much more vivid picture of what something means when I base it on words I
have already learnt, as opposed to on a whole new system I need to get used to.

To what is the difference between 성립 and 확립? One can know it if they’ve learnt the
Hanja, but one could understand it better, and how to use it, if they have heard of 구
성, 확정, etc
You can do it just as well without learning the characters tied to each word honestly.
That Korean learning generally does not include Hanja is probably something that counts
towards it being easier (easier than if it did include Hanja, not easier that Japanese
necessarily)
1 x

User avatar
leosmith
Brown Belt
Posts: 1341
Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2016 10:06 pm
Location: Seattle
Languages: English (N)
Spanish (adv)
French (int)
German (int)
Japanese (int)
Korean (int)
Mandarin (int)
Portuguese (int)
Russian (int)
Swahili (int)
Tagalog (int)
Thai (int)
x 3099
Contact:

Re: The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

Postby leosmith » Tue Oct 17, 2017 2:09 am

4valor wrote:most people would unquestionably take the word of Professor Arguelles over your own (given that he states he has studied Korean for 9 years vs your 13 months). Being B1 Korean myself, perhaps it is harder to progress on to the later levels than some of the other more difficult languages? Or perhaps the difficulty is specifically related to listening/speaking, where I suspect Korean may be the hardest.

Also, kind of off topic, but I have been meaning to ask if you felt Pimsleur was particular useful in your Korean journey?

I suspect the Professor only put about an hour a day into Korean, which might shed some light on the 15 year estimation. I know he was studying many other languages at the same time from his other posts. I can't answer about upper levels as I'm mainly interested in a high B2. I made much less progress in Mandarin and Japanese overall in the same amount of time, which in my mind makes them more difficult.

Pimsleur was extremely useful because I designed my language plan around it. There are links to transcripts in my log if you're interested.
1 x
https://languagecrush.com/reading - try our free multi-language reading tool

User avatar
leosmith
Brown Belt
Posts: 1341
Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2016 10:06 pm
Location: Seattle
Languages: English (N)
Spanish (adv)
French (int)
German (int)
Japanese (int)
Korean (int)
Mandarin (int)
Portuguese (int)
Russian (int)
Swahili (int)
Tagalog (int)
Thai (int)
x 3099
Contact:

Re: The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

Postby leosmith » Tue Oct 17, 2017 2:32 am

Sayonaroo wrote:I think it's easier to look up words in Japanese because unlike Korean they don't have multiple ways to spell words since they don't use an alphabet. For Japanese i could just look up the hiragana

Because I studied pronunciation from the beginning, I almost always spell Korean words correctly. When I do make a mistake, I find I'm able to correct it easily. With Japanese, hiragana often wasn't enough with the dictionaries I used. Maybe due to old tools though.

I found Japanese to be much easier to learn than Korean precisely because the Japanese language uses chinese characters

I find the opposite to be true, as I think most westerners would, no offense.

Can you imagine learning Korean without having first learned some Japanese?

Yes, it would have been harder than learning it after for sure. And I might have told people I thought it was the hardest language in the world, up until the time I learned either Japanese or Chinese that is.

I think that would be super inefficient because of all the sinowords

Knowing Chinese characters is helpful for vocabulary acquisition in Korean, but certainly not a necessity. Thanks for posting that thread, by the way.
1 x
https://languagecrush.com/reading - try our free multi-language reading tool

MacGyver
Yellow Belt
Posts: 95
Joined: Wed Aug 24, 2016 12:36 am
Languages: .
x 173

Re: The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

Postby MacGyver » Tue Oct 17, 2017 4:12 am

Thanks for this thread, its nice to see some good counters to some of the negativity around.

I can only compare Korean to German, and well, Korean has been a much harder journey so far. But I don't think that's news hot off the press. Haha.

Without meaning any disrespect, I found Prof Arguelles comments unhelpful. I recall him saying something about the need to learn 1000s of hanja so you could read newspapers. But I don't think that is the case these days. And while Korean is difficult and my level is still low, it doesn't seem to be the Herculean challenge he implies it is.
2 x

4valor
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Oct 16, 2017 11:37 pm
Languages: English (N), Korean (B1)
x 6

Re: The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

Postby 4valor » Tue Oct 17, 2017 5:20 am

I suspect the Professor only put about an hour a day into Korean, which might shed some light on the 15 year estimation. I know he was studying many other languages at the same time from his other posts.


You could right. I got to B1 in a year only doing an 1.5 hours a day of almost pure SRS (not including chatting to my Korean wife/TV). 15 years is ludicrous. I think learning multiple languages at the same time may have been the issue. I also doubt he used any form of SRS, which I think would make Korean extremely difficult and frustrating.

Thanks for the tip on Pimsleur. I am actually making my own Pimsleur style Korean course based on the audio from Korean Grammar in Use using Gradint. I like to think of it as Pimsleur on steroids.
2 x

User avatar
tarvos
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2889
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 11:13 am
Location: The Lowlands
Languages: Native: NL, EN
Professional: ES, RU
Speak well: DE, FR, RO, EO, SV
Speak reasonably: IT, ZH, PT, NO, EL, CZ
Need improvement: PO, IS, HE, JP, KO, HU, FI
Passive: AF, DK, LAT
Dabbled in: BRT, ZH (SH), BG, EUS, ZH (CAN), and a whole lot more.
Language Log: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/fo ... PN=1&TPN=1
x 6093
Contact:

Re: The ‘I don't Hate Korean’ Thread

Postby tarvos » Tue Oct 17, 2017 8:20 am

Mandarin helps with vocabulary and understanding some words, nothing more than that in my experience.
2 x
I hope your world is kind.

Is a girl.


Return to “General Language Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests