Korean Job Discussion Forums

[CentralCali]

[pugwall]

From friends who are studying Chinese full time, most of the study is just a memory exercise learning characters as the grammar is so simple.

A Korean person told me that they say that Japanese seems easy for 6 months and the gets a lot harder and Chinese seems hard for the first 6 months and the gets a lot easier.

[Kenny Kimchee]

Grammatically, Korean and Japanese are quite similar (e.g. SOV, honorifics, use of particles, etc.), so if you have experience learning one language then it's pretty easy to pick up the other.

I was in Korea from 20002-2003 and made a half-arsed attempt at studying the language. I studied by myself using the awful 한국어회화 (published by 고려대) and had no clue what was going on.

I moved to Japan in 2003 and lived in the boonies for 3 years while teaching on JET. I cranked it out on the Japanese study and passed Level 3 of the JLPT.

I came back to Korea in 2006 and found Korean study a lot easier after studying Japanese. In many instances, it's just a simple case of learning new vocabulary and then plugging the words in - this is why Koreans/Japanese learn each other's languages so quickly. I lived in Japan for 3 years, was the only native speaker at my school, and studied my butt off - yet I often meet Korean university students who have never been to Japan, took a semester of the language at university, watch dramas on TV...and they speak better Japanese than I do!

[little mixed girl]

i'd say they have equal difficulty.

chinese has grammar that's similar to english. but you have to learn the characters, and if you want to be able to talk with people you gotta get the pronunciation down.

some people just study to learn how to read and write, but they can't speak.

japanese grammar is 90% similar to korean grammar.
the only sounds you need to learn are a, i, u e o.
you also need to learn hiragana, katakana and kanji.

so, chinese:
+ grammar is similar to english
- have to learn the characters
- have to learn the pronunciation

japanese:
+ pronunciation is simple
- grammar is similar to korean
- have to learn 3 writing styles.

[Tiger Beer]

I started studying Japanese through Pimsleur. It's much easier to remember the words when you can pronounce them.

In Korean, there are a few words that are more aspirated than others, and more difficult to reprounce. Japanese feels easier because of that alone!

While I havent studied Mandarin, I'd think the tonal part of the language would be REAL unnatural when it came to making sentences (much like making an effort to make those more aspirated sounds in Korean when needed) Seems to me like you'd just want to relax a bit and speak a few syllables monotone once in awhile, and it would be real hard to keep from doing that.

[Kuros]