Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ryanweh]

I have looked through many different peoples post, and it seem that their is a common theme of everyone working from sunrise to sunset. One of my goals in going to Korea to teach is to also learn Korean. My question is if their is any real time to learn Korean?

[fustiancorduroy]

It depends or your job, but most of all it depends on you. If you study Korean for even just 30 minutes a day, such as when you are riding the subway, your Korean will be good enough in a short amount of time to live here fairly comfortably. If you want to be fluent in a year, well... that ain't gonna happen if you are working full time as an English teacher.

[World Traveler]

Korean is one of the most difficult languages in the world. New applicants aren't aware of this because they read lies on recruiting agency websites (recruiters get paid huge amounts of money per placement) about what an easy language Korean is to learn. This is not true at all. That Korean is an easy language to learn is one of the biggest myths out there. (a myth perpetuated by scummy recruiters)

[Chambertin]

While I have to agree to a certain point that Korean is difficult, after studying a few other languages I find it better than many and harder than most. Japanese � Chinese � English are my holy trio of insane difficulty.

While it is completely possible to learn it in your spare time and there are many different classes or groups available to help you it all boils down to this:

How much of your spare time will you devote to language?

That�s the only difference in how fast I made progress in any of the languages I studied. Regardless of difficulty if you are truly willing to give up spare time and study you will make leaps and bounds in it.

With that in mind a Hagwon will leave little at school spare time to study.
A public school may leave you with other teachers trying to use all their spare time to talk to you in English.

Remember you were carted here on the free plane to speak English, most of your friends and colleagues will use that skill whenever they can so that will cut down on the at work and social spare time to devote to the learning.

Still, it is completely possible to go far in the language quickly, just keep it in mind in your daily life and keep going outside your comfort zones to force you to use it in daily life.

EDIT:
My trick was to study in almost silence until I could use it (somewhat) when they try to talk to me in English. I used it as a teaching tool in conversation, and it became a stepping stone for both of us. However I don't have as much time as I want to devote to these sessions, so I'm still FAR from where I wanted to be.

Rant from here on out
/EDIT

Why are Japanese � Chinese � English my holy trio of crazy?

Japanese about 7 layers of polite, 2k minimum Kanji with more for college level. Multiple readings and the horrid attempts at reading the names. (even domestic people have trouble)

Chinese, I have limited experience but I really lost it when I realized that there was no domestic phonetic alphabet. I do remember and have heard that it is not difficult to learn to speak as a westerner, just insane to become fluent.

English. Where do I start? I have hated our systems of writing and insanely inconsistent grammEr since I was a child. The slang, the reinvention of regulations with every generation, so on and so forth. Lets just say I am a prime example of those who cant do teach. I hated English so much I am happy to teach it just so that my students won�t hate it as much as I did, I do everything I can to simplify and look for logic and reason in this maze of instability.

Funny thing is the more you learn about any language the more you realize there�s no such thing as fluent. Every language is evolutionary and if you stop learning for more than 2 years you will miss plenty of changes.

In other words, you never stop studying a language, even if it is your first.

EDIT 2:
About the levels of study, you can make those hours weeks.
I intensively studied Japanese for 4 years, worked as a translator for 1 of them and lived there for the better part of it. If it weren�t for a BS in BS, good friends, and a Very good knowledge of business I would have been hung out to dry.

No matter how good you are, when the speaker goes on a rant, its a nightmare to keep up, let alone keep it accurate to what they want to say socially, culturally, and technically.

[freakyaye852]

7 forms in Japanese? Sure? Masu, ru, keigo, some honorific? I'm actually interested I'm not trying to be combatative.

And Chinese is harder than Japanese. While Japanese has kun and om readings its easy to guess the reading if you can speak a little right? Like, you wont mistranslate mainichi and kinou (I think they are the same cant remember)

Whereas even though mandarin is grammatically easier than japanese words that are said the same require totally different characters when written. Not to mention traditional characters!

Korean has Japanese grammar with an alphabet, you don't need the characters (hanja). So that makes it easier than both in my opinion. And the Politeness system in Korean is much harder than Jap IMO.

[jonpurdy]

[Chet Wautlands]

People make the mistake of deciding whether they will learn a language by looking at how many years it will take to become fluent. Thank God babies aren't given this choice or most people would speak no language at all.

Saying it takes 12 years to learn Korean doesn't really mean anything.

If you study Korean regularly, you'll get a little better everyday. There's no mystery to this language and it's only "harder" than Spanish or French because the grammar and vocabulary are less similar. That having been said, if you study regularly, after a month you'll have a basic idea of how Korean grammar 'works' and then it's just a matter of learning and using those patterns.

There are English speakers in every country who have convinced themselves that they cannot learn the local language. Meanwhile, the local children around them are learning the language one word at a time...

[Welsh Canadian]

[ThingsComeAround]

Are you really self-motivated to learn Korean?
I'm not. I need another source to help "push" the drive to learn.

I've tried at my PS school. Most times people are too busy, or when they do "help" it ends up being a language exchange in ENGLISH which doesn't help my goal of learning KOREAN

I've joined hagwons before. 3, in fact, in the past 2 years. It's all about finding the right one. And being able to pay for it (all the ones I went to are around 270 per month, unless you go Sat)

But I have known others that had the drive to study alone. That just isn't me.

[Seoul'n'Corea]

[World Traveler]

[World Traveler]

[b-class rambler]

How easily and how quickly someone progresses in a foreign language can vary massively from one individual to another.

There are the obvious factors like differences in motivation, methods and productivity of study time. But your own language background plays a big role too. It's certainly true that Korean generally is reckoned to be one of the hardest languages to learn from scratch for native English speakers. (It's one of the easiest for people with certain other mother tongues.) However, if you already have a background of language study then that's some help. And a background in language with similar structure to Korean (Japanese, Turkish, Persian etc) would be a big help.

[b-class rambler]

I've got to a reasonably advanced level in both Japanese and Korean and this would be my take on which is harder.

Bottom line is what I said above - it depends on the individual.

Personally, I'd say there are aspects of Japanese I think are more difficult than their Korean equivalents and also aspects of Korean that are more difficult. If you learnt one before the other you'd probably find the second one easier, thanks to your experience of learning the first. If you were learning both from scratch simultaneously then it could go either way.

I'd agree with the comments above about the intricacies of Japanese polite forms at the very highest level. Japanese is obviously much harder to write as well. You need to master stroke order of characters to write them properly and generally you don't remember how to read them either if you don't know the stroke order.

Pronunciation is much easier in Japanese. There really aren't any sounds an English speaker should have trouble with, whereas quite of few of the similar sounding consonants in Korean will be difficult for many people to pick up as well as actually say correctly. Japanese verb conjugation is as easy as any language I've come across. Korean is a little trickier in that regard, although still easier than many European languages.

Kanji is what frightens many people when learning Japanese. I think it's a hurdle that can be vastly overstated, however. Yes, high school kids have around 2000 on their curriculum that they're supposed to learn. But lots of them don't ever master anywhere near that number. If you know not much over 1000, you'll probably get by in most situations and be able to read most things you encounter in everyday life.

Kanji is a little bit like English spelling - many native speakers are a long, long way from the perfect level of their official government curricula, but they still get by. And just like spell checkers have made some English speakers lazily bad at spelling, cell phones and computers in Japanese have done the same with their kanji ability.

That's just my take. As I said, everyone's perspective will differ in some way.

[Chet Wautlands]