Who's Learning Korean?

Doremeduck wrote: Really?! Wow. Thanks!

kurinezumi wrote: All depends on what you mean by "learn"... or at what point you will consider yourself to have "learned" the language. According to the US Foreign Service Institute, the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn (and it does depend a lot on your native language) are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean (with Korean actually considered the most difficult), and for their staff (who generally already know more than one language) it takes an average of 2200 hours or 88 weeks to learn to read and speak. (That's 25 hours a week, or 5 hours a day if you rest on weekends, and in a formal classroom environment).



Yonsei University's Korean language program (which is both immersion and intensive) takes 1.5-2 years to complete. (They do 200 hours a term for 6-8 terms, or 1200-1600 hours)

But either of these options will take you to the level where you can do university studies or conduct high level business in Korean. If your goals are more modest (like basically understanding dramas without subtitles, or being able to hold basic conversations when traveling in Korea) then obviously the time necessary is much less, but it will also depend on whether your self study is more or less effective than these formal classes.

So 6 months I think is ambitious to reach a truly fluent state, unless you are a language genius, or your native language is not English, but something closer to Korean or Japanese. But 6 months is certainly enough time to feel like you are making progress and starting to understand more of what you hear.

kurinezumi wrote: I think it is kind of hard to quantify absolutely, but the Foreign Service Institute does have a lot of experience teaching, so it is probably generally true. There are lots of factors... obviously the word order is different, and there is very little vocabulary that crosses over (except for some words that came into Korean from English) so if you compare it to a romance language it is obviously more difficult (but if you watch a lot of dramas you're going to pick stuff up naturally), and it has the different levels of speech, which is something English doesn't have, and particles, which are sometimes like prepositions (but post-positions), and sometimes not exactly, and pronunciation-wise there are lots of distinctions (mainly in the consonants) that English doesn't make (English mainly makes distinctions between voiced and unvoiced consonants p-b, k-g, t-d, but in Korean voicing is unimportant, they instead make distinctions with aspiration and tense)

But Hangul, I would argue, is the most logical writing system in the world (of the ones I know), so that part is not so difficult.

Anyway, I think it is better not to think of Korean as hard to learn, but to think of other languages as easy to learn :) Because in the end, even if it is "harder" it is still possible!

cityhunter83 wrote: the idea that korean is supposed to be really hard language to learn is astonishing to me. years before i even knew asian dramas existed i watched anime in japanese. all together i may have picked up on a handful of words. after only 3 months of watching korean dramas i had picked up enough vocabulary to understand at least one word out of every sentence, something that was greatly accelerated once i learned about the sentence structure.


i also studied latin for 3 years, a language that one would think much easier than korean b/c the roots of our own language lie in latin. i have found korean to be much easier.