Korean Job Discussion Forums

[PatrickGHBusan]

I agree with your last points completely Sean.

[World Traveler]

Saw this online:

[Kepler]

It took this guy nearly a decade to approach native like fluency in Korean, and he is very, very good at learning languages:

"For five or six years, before I married and had children, I would study for 16 hours a day. I'd transcribe Irish, Persian, Hindi, Turkish, Swahili. Gradually, all these wonderful languages started to swim into focus, and ever increasing numbers of great works became accessible....

"Now, I can read about three dozen languages and speak most of them fluently, and I've studied many more....

"Exotic languages can be more of a challenge. I worked as a professor in Korea for eight years and it took almost a decade to get my Korean skills close to native level. We live in Singapore now, and at home I speak French with my sons, unless my Korean wife is there, in which case we'll use English. If we don't want the kids to understand everything we're saying, we use Korean."
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/mar/16/i-speak-50-languages-experience

I am reminded of a Russian proverb:

"If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one."

The more time you spend learning Korean the less time you have to do other things. If you spend a year learning Korean and later decide your time could have been better spent then that is one year you can never get back. It is gone forever. I don't think learning Korean beyond a basic level would be worth it for most foreign teachers.

[PRagic]

Think I read somewhere that Korean is the 14th most widely spoken language in the world, particulary given the large diaspora.

[PatrickGHBusan]

Something funny in the message posted by Kepler. I mean the guys says he speaks and reads dozens of languages fluently and lists Hindi, Persian and Swahili in that bunch.

Then as a contrast he discusses Korean as a exotic language that is harder to learn.

It may be just me but Swahili and Persian do not strike me as non-exotic or simple languages to learn when compared to Korean.

[Adam Carolla]

[Kepler]

Hindi and Persian are Indo-European languages so I would expect them to be easier to learn.

[creeper1]

[Fox]

[PRagic]

Unless you wait for reunification and the head up north. They don't use hanja up in dem dar parts...

[SeoulNate]

[PatrickGHBusan]

Thanks for the responses, most interesting.

I still think Swahili would qualify as an exotic language and would be hard to learn.

The one point I will make concerning learning a language is that there 4 key factors that will determine how well a person learns a new language and what level of proficiency they can attain (these are my observations as a language learner and what I have seen in others):

1- Motivation: if your motivation(s) to learn are deep set and mostly intrinsic in nature you will overcome difficulties in learning more easily, regardless of the target language.

2- Having learned a second language already in your life: this will make it a ton easier as you already have strategies in place and experience with the challenges and efficient pathways to learning a language

3- Context: Are you in an "immersion" setting? Do you have access to varied practice opportunities? Do you have the time to devote to the language.

4- Goal: Why are you learning this language and to what end (full fluency, conversational fluency, reading fluency...)? This ties into motivation above and it will determine how far you go.


If all of these factors are clear for you then you will not see spending time learning a new language as a "waste" or as "preventing you from doing something else".

Taking 3 examples to illustrate this (from my immediate family):

1- My brother: He has been living in Japan for nearly 20 years by now. He got married to a local woman after a couple of years there. His motivation was high and intrinsic because he wanted to learn Japanese to be able to communicate with his wife's family but also to become more autonomous in Japan as a foreign resident. He also wanted to open more employment doors. He had, like myself, already learned a "second" language (French) to fluency. His context was highly favorable as he was in immersion and had ample opportunity to practice which further fueled his level of motivation. He reached what I consider to be full fluency within a couple of years.

2- My wife: She moved to Canada with me in 2008. Since then she has learned French to what I consider to be conversational fluency. Her motivation was reasonably high and it was based on external factors: employment and cultural adaptability in her new country. Her goal was employment and family driven. She had a reasonably favorable context even if we live in an area that is not predominantly French. She had already learned a second language in Korea (English) to reasonable fluency. She reached conversational fluency in French within 3 years here in Canada.

3- My friend Allan, from Canada (Toronto), lived in Korea for 6 years, now in China. He had mid-level motivation to learn Korean, mostly to enable himself to get around the country on his own and to speak to his Korean friends. He had not second language when he arrived in Korea. He had favorable immersion context as he was living in Korea but he also had a limited goal. He stalled at intermediate Korean, meaning he can engage in very basic conversation and basic reading. That was fine for him, he needed nothing more and he frankly found the effort required to move to a higher level to be too much for him.


The overall point I am trying to make is that motivation, goals, context and pre-conditions (language learning history) can all trump the difficulty associated with learning a new language. To me the difficulty of a language is far less relevant to end state success than why the learner is trying to learn this language, in what context and to what end...

Fox you made an interesting point but I can tell you that I am able to read "dense academic texts" without too many hurdles. This goes for novels as well.

Just my two cents.

[World Traveler]

[Fox]

[World Traveler]