Toughts on Learning Korean

I've been studying a lot of Korean recently because I'm going to Korea very soon. Thanks to Talk to me in Korean I was quite successful in doing so, especially when you compared it to how little I learned from the various books I bought. In May I wrote about how to read and write the Korean Alphabet (Hangul) and that was basically all I could do except maybe say hi to someone. Despite knowing a lot more about the language I wasn't really able to use it and actually construct sentences. It's one thing to passively know something and then actively use it, especially in a conversation when you have to answer something fast.

When learning Korean, I've noticed a few things worth mentioning:

1) There are a lot of loanwords in Korean


When I learned Hangul I was surprised that I was able to understand some Korean words even though I haven't learned any words yet. All the words I understood turned out to be loanwords from the English language. But these are just a small part of loanwords in Korea, the much bigger part being Sino-Korean words (Koreanized Chinese loanwords). Numbers or days of the week for example have their origin in Chinese. There are two types of Sino-Korean words: Those directly borrowed from written Chinese and those coined in Japan or Korea but using Chinese characters. I'm going to write about Sino-Korean words in more detail in a future blog post.


2) The Korean Alphabet is very easy to learn


I already said this in a blog post back in May: The Korean Alphabet is really easy to learn. Hangul is totally different from Chinese or Japanese, where you need to be able to read or write roughly 3000 or more characters to be fluent, the latter being even more difficult because there are not only all Chinese-based characters (Kanji) but also Hiragana and Katakana. I'm sure I'll cover the Japanese writing system some day. In the meantime, please refer to Google or Wikipedia if you want to know more about it. The Korean Alphabet consists of just a few vowels and consonants, plus some double consonants. That's it. Chinese characters exist in the Korean language as well (Hanja) but you don't need to know them to be able to read Korean.

3) It's hard to stay motivated...


This is mainly because as a German (or English for that matter) native speaker, Korean is very difficult to learn. Words, sentence structures, honorifics are just part of the problem, the other one being that there is little material available to learn Korean properly. Walk into a bookshop and compare the material dedicated to learning Korean and the material dedicated to learning Chinese or Japanese and you'll know what I mean. Additionally, most of these books are either structured badly, really boring, or both. The best way to learn Korean is online via Talk to me in Korean, a website dedicated to teach the Korean language and Korean culture. What's best: It's not only fun to learn Korean with them, it's also free. Only very few items are uniquely made for the store and even though I haven't tried them yet I'd bet $1.000.000 that they're worth the small price tag.

So how do I stay motivated? Well, for one, with Talk to me in Korean it's actually quite fun to study Korean and it also helps to have Korean friends who can clarify things when you encounter problems.
At this point: Thanks to my Korean friends helping me out from time to time. I love you! But the real key to successfully motivate myself is knowing this:

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race" - Calvin Coolidge

Getting Started with Korean: Reading

Yesterday I told you how I learned and practiced Hangul, the Korean alphabet. Learning Hangul is the most important step you'll ever make when starting to learn Korean.  Even without ever having learned any Korean words, you'll be able to guess what the English equivalents of the following 5 country names are:

1. 캐나다
2. 스웨덴 
3. 브라질
4. 프랑스
5. 폴란드

I found it to be incredibly motivating when I found out that I was able to read Korean words and understand their meanings only about 30 minutes after I began learning the alphabet. 
Country names are not the only words you'll understand when you're able to read Hangul. There are a lot of Korean loan words that have been borrowed from the English language. Try to read the following 5 words:

1. 호텔
2. 인터뷰
3. 바나나
4. 피아노
5. 소시지

The English translations of these 10 words can be found in the comments to this blog post. Be sure to at least try to read them before you'll have a look. I'm sure you'll figure it out pretty easily!

Getting Started with Korean: The Alphabet

The first thing you should be learning when starting a new language is the alphabet. Luckily, the Korean alphabet (Hangul) is very easy to learn as there are just 24 letters you have to know, 14 consonants and 10 vowels. I learned Hangul in a couple of minutes by watching the video below, provided by KoreanClass101 (click here to watch it directly on Youtube):

See? It's really easy. A whole sentence written entirely in Hangul looks like this: 

피곤해요. 그렇지만 영화 보고 싶어요. (- I'm tired but 

I want to see a movie.)

Obviously, watching just one video about Hangul isn't enough to be able to read and write it properly. That's why I recommend you to practice it here.

Which is the hardest language to learn?

While some attempts have been made, it is very difficult to determine the most difficult language. A learner's native language is very important when learning a new language as an adult, thus rendering universal rankings of difficulty meaningless. A native English speaker will learn Dutch much more easily than a Japanese native would. The closer the native language is to the target language, the easier language acquisition will be. 

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State compiled a list with 63 languages and after analyzing their difficulty for English native speakers. There are three categories of languages:

Category I: Languages closely related to English (23-24 weeks)

• - Dutch
• - French
• - Italian
• - Norwegian
• - Portuguese
• - Spanish 
• - Swedish
• ...

(30-36 weeks)

• - German
• - Indonesian
• ...

Category II: Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English (44 weeks)

• - Czech
• - Greek
• - Hindi
• - Polish
• - Persian
• - Thai
• - Turkish
• - Vietnamese
• - ...

Category III: Languages which are quite difficult for native English speakers (88 weeks)

• - Arabic
• - Cantonese
• - Chinese (Mandarin)
• - Japanese
• - Korean

So of the 10 languages I set out to learn 6 are in Category I (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese), 3 are in Category III (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and I guess Russian must be in Category II, though I didn’t find it in the FSI’s list.

What are the most spoken languages?

There are a few ways you can measure use of language. Mandarin Chinese (1) has by far the most native speakers with more than one billion natives, followed by Spanish (2), English (3), Hindi/Urdu (4), Arabic (5), Bengali (6) and Portuguese (7). However, when secondary speakers enter the equation, the ranking looks something like this: 

1. Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion)
2. English (480 million)
3. Spanish (320 million)
4. Russian (285 million)
5. French (265 million)
6. Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
7. Arabic (221 million)

In other words, if you learn any or all of these seven languages, you can communicate with a lot of people. If you can reach them, that is. The most used language in business is still English and the most used languages by the internet population are the following:

1. English (295.4 million)
2. Chinese (110.0 million)
3. Spanish (86.0 million)
4. Japanese (67.1 million)
5. German (55.3 million)
6. French (33.9 million)
7. Korean (31.3 million)
8. Italian (30.4 million)
9. Portuguese (29.4 million)
10. Russian (22 million)

Coincidentally, these are exactly the ten languages I’m studying and that I want to master until I’m 30. I’ve always wanted to be able to communicate with as many people as possible in their language. Somehow I intuitively chose the ten most used languages in the  internet. Do you think it’s more useful to learn the most spoken languages as opposed to the ones I learn? I will write more about why you should learn languages and which languages are best to choose in another blog post.

Team Addition - Seyoung

I'd like to say hi to 세영  (Seyoung), who will be contributing to this blog from time to time. He'll be writing mainly about Mandarin Chinese and Korean, two languages he's fluent in and that are very difficult to learn for English native speakers.