Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Thiuda]

Who is learning Korean as a third language after having acquired a second language to a high degree of proficiency (upper-intermediate to advanced)?

I speak German as an L1, English as my L2 and am learning Korean as an L3. It seems to me that English influences my Korean more than my German and I'm asking myself whether others have had the same experience. Which of your two languages has influenced your Korean acquisition to a greater extent, your first, or your second language?

Your thoughts on this matter are much appreciated.

[tomato]

Sorry, I can't give you much confirmation.
I have had three years of Spanish and a year and a half in Bolivia,
but if anything is boosting my Korean acquisition, I haven't felt it.

[UknowsI]

Korean is my L4, and while I mixed my L2 and L3 while studying them, Korean is so different that I've had no problems with it.

Note that I'm quite poor at German which is my 3rd language. The annoying part is that it's still better than my Korean even though I've studied Korean so much more...

[cheolsu]

I also learned English as a second language. Korean is the third language I speak proficiently, in many ways better than my first language. My first language isn't a European language or an East Asian language. Having learned a language makes it easier to learn another one in certain ways. Nothing about having learned English per se as a child makes it easier to learn Korean except for English loan words. But, having done so:

- I think I'm more sensitive mimicking how people use language, since I did that with English as a child to fit in at school. This means not trying to say things like "How are you?" or speak Korean as translated English with lots of second-person pronouns.
- I can accept that rules don't always make sense. Korean pronunciation is often tricky.
- I'm willing, having already done so out of necessity, to sound awkward in a foreign language. I was once told that when I speak Korean, I speak carefully and sound like a country bumpkin trying to mask his accent in the big city.

[meaghan]

English is my L1, French is my L2 and I've spoken it fluently since childhood. I also have a smattering of Italian.

French (and Spanish, I'm told) have very similar phonics to Korean. When I was starting out, I think this helped a lot with pronunciation. I still struggle a bit with vowels, but I think that's more English's fault than French's. The L/R sound and the softer consonants were less trouble for me than some folks I know who only spoke English.

English and French grammar are fairly different from one another and both are riddled with exceptions, so I think I was prepared, mentally, to learn another really difficult grammar - Korean grammar is extremely foreign to me, but it is at least quite regular and I haven't had much trouble with it. I've heard that German grammar has a lot in common with Korean, can any German speakers confirm or deny this?

When I first moved to Korea, I kept subconsciously thinking I was hearing French spoken around me when in fact it was of course Korean. This was in part due to the phonetic similarities, but mostly, I imagine, due to my brain having two language tracks: English and not-English. Now when I have French music on and am not really paying attention to it, I subconsciously think I'm hearing random Korean words.

Korean does have a couple of French loanwords ("bbang" (bread) = "pain" in French - the finial n in French sounds fairly similar to the ng sound in Korean), but not nearly so many as English or Chinese and not enough to make much of a difference.

The other area where I've noticed my languages mixing is (nerd alert!) playing online scrabble. I play this a lot with friends from home, and whenever I'm looking at my letters, trying to think of words that have those sounds, I think why, oh why doesn't the scrabble dictionary include "chingu" or "takgu"??

I think Cheolsu makes a good point though, which I second. That is that any other language you've acquired is going to help at least a bit with learning Korean, because your brain and attitude have already formed good habits for language acquisition. I've heard that one you get up to L5 and L6, learning additional languages becomes waaaay easier.

[Thiuda]

[cheolsu]

My native language is Urdu. It's a SOV language like Korean, though I actually thought it was SVO like English for the first year I was here. (Don't ask, there aren't many chances to speak Urdu here.)

[redaxe]

I'm a native English speaker who learned Mandarin Chinese to a high degree of fluency and Japanese to a low-intermediate level before attempting to learn Korean.

While Chinese and Korean are not genetically related languages, and have radically different grammatical structures, knowing Chinese helped immensely with Korean vocabulary because many Korean words are loan words from Chinese.

Knowing basic Japanese helped a lot with the grammar of Korean because it has the same word order, SOV structure, and use of topic/subject/object marker particles.

I basically don't "think in English" at all when I speak Asian languages. It's sort of like I flip a switch that turns my brain to "Asian language mode." I never mix up English with my Asian languages. But if I try to speak Japanese now, it's mostly Korean words that come out of my mouth. I visited China recently and almost spoke Korean to some Chinese people on accident a few times.

So, my three Asian languages interfere with each other sometimes. But my English never interferes or gets interfered with. It's in its own separate compartment in my brain by virtue of being my native language.

[zappadelta]

[crossmr]

[tomato]

[winterfall]

Korean is the simplified version of east asian languages. Learn this, next step is Japanese. After that Chinese. If your L1 is English, you shouldn't have too many problems with Chinese. They're pretty similar

[Charlie Bourque]

[Charlie Bourque]

[crossmr]