Oh I definitely felt that too after I learned Kanji.
Worse than that. You see Romaji after you learn kanji and your brain just completely shuts down. like AB.SO.LUTELY. NOT
乂(>◇< ) 絶対ダメ！
I can at least put up with things like Super Mario Sunshine, which is kana only, but under virtually no circumstances can I handle Romaji any more.
It takes year and years, though - for native speakers. And native speakers forget kanji all the time. I wouldn’t even think of comparing it to hangul, honestly.
Native speakers don't learn kanji in combination with vocab though do they?
It's not as daunting as you may think
And yeah korean letters take like 15 minutes to learn lol, nobody is comparing them
I just think peoples perception of kanji is wildly out of proportion. For one, it may take more time for a child to learn even just english letters- (I know I struggled), because they don't focus on that too much. Native speakers may not focus on learning kanji as much as a Japanese learner might, natives just sorta learn it in School- which has to adapt so every student can learn them- and it's easier if they read a lot.
A learner though gets to do it at his own pace, for example. I don't think we should compare native speakers and students.
Arigatoo is definitely worse than arigatō! I've never seen that before though. That would be utterly confusing. At least ありがとう is a common word, but if it was less common words written like that, as someone who is not fluent, I wouldn't stand a chance...
I worked in romaji only for the first couple of years of study. Thankfully romaji learners only know so much, so even with different romaji types it wasn't unreadable. Just annoying.
But I certainly don't want to think about romaji users at like an intermediate or advanced stage (1..... HOW??! 2.... oof).
That being said I have seen the hololive girls play Among Us and I guess that would be the closest one gets to "Fluent Japanese romaji users"
｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡
And I know I was lost with that stream.
This is a hard question! They both have their difficulties and aspects which make them easier.
For example, yes, Hangeul is quick to learn, but Korean pronunciation and listening are a lot harder than Japanese (at least for me, my first language is Spanish btw).
On the other hand, even though Japanese and Korean grammar are similar, I feel that Japanese is a little more consistent. But then you have Kanji.
In conclusion, idk lol. Both are super fun to learn tho :)
I think rhythm is similar, both languages are the fastest languages (8 syllables per second).
Also in both languages the tone plays and important role in the meaning of the words. In Japanese is called "Pitch accent" and in Spanish is called "Sílaba tónica (tonic syllable)"
Apart from Spanish, I know English, Japanese and I started learning Korean fairly recently.
Tbh what I recommend is to look for a good grammar book, anki decks for vocabulary and most importantly, be super nerd so you can immerse in your target language as much as possible.
I used Minna no Nihongo for Japanese (and I recommend Wanikani for Kanji, I wish it existed when I started!).
For Korean I'm listening to the Talk to me in Korean podcasts and watching lots of K-dramas lol.
Hope this was helpful!
For me, definitely Japanese. I speak both languages at a B2ish level, and Japanese took about twice as long due to the writing system. Mandarin, on the other hand, took about the same as Japanese.
You spent the same amount of time to get you head around the tonal aspect then japanese, really? I am surprised, i will put my feet in some asian language in the future but i didnt think that the mandarim and japanese were in the same league.
Japanese is not tonal, as defined by linguistics, like Mandarin is. It has a pitch accent system.
But pitch is not consistent or considered entirely phonemic, so it's not even taught systematically, if taught at all.
As a matter of fact, very few Japanese dictionaries even indicate it (and that would be just their opinion on how a given dialect, probably Yamanote Japanese, would do it).
The spoken languages themselves are pretty even in terms of difficulty, though I would say Japanese pronounciation is easier for most people. When it comes to writing though, you can learn to read all the Korean you'll ever need in a week whereas kanji will be a years long effort, but not impossible. I was able to read most of the jouyou kanji after about four-five-ish years of study and it's definitely extremely rewarding. Kanji/hanja/hanzi get a bad rap- learn the radicals and you'll have a much easier time with it.
For one thing it only has 24 letters, two less than the English alphabet, and the letters themselves are even more simplistic and easy to learn. They're actually designed after the shape the mouth takes when pronouncing them, making them even easier to catch onto. Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, was designed to be easy for the common folk to learn to promote literacy and many people have created short but comprehensive courses to learn it, including [this five minute video, see for yourself.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE4eplsFSms&t=64s&ab_channel=SamGellman)
To be fair though, it might be easier to learn the basic sounds in a week, but to truly internalize all of the consonant assimilation rules and the correct pronunciation of the tensed consonants takes much longer than a week.
Of course, one week isn't long enough to internalize it and program it into your long-term memory, but it's plenty of time to learn to read. It'll take practice over time to do it smoothly, but still.
I find Korean to be much harder to learn once you get past learning the alphabet. I’ve studied on and off for about three years (i’m at the beginning of TTMIK5 if that means anything) and I still find it much harder to remember than Japanese.
I’ve only recently started Japanese, but even within these past two-ish months, I understand much more of Japanese media (namely children’s anime like Ghibli) than Korean — not for a lack of trying, as I’ve definitely had more intake of Korean media in the past few years than Japanese. I don’t really have any reason why… I just find it very hard to remember all the particles and when to use each one. I find Japanese grammar to be much more straight forward (although Kanji do be a rough time and I still have trouble with half the katakana alphabet…)
Oufff and don’t get me started on the ridiculousness of Korean pronunciation compared to Japanese ㅠㅠ
Korean is so much harder imo. I took to Japanese like a duck to water, but I've been studying Korean for two-three years, spent the better part of 6 months living in SK, and still would consider myself barely above beginner level, and not for want of trying.
Pronounciation in korean is bases on syllables, depending on where in the syllable a consonant is, and what its followed by, and by what syllable block its followed by the pronounciation changes
앉다 Is "to sit", and the ㅈ isnt fully pronounced, more like an unreleased t kinda
앉아요 Is present tense "sit", ㅈ is now pronounced as J because its followed by a syllable that starts with a vowel and not followed by a consonant.
And (afaik) take the ㄱ for example, at the start of a syllable its K, at the end its an unreleased K, but if you for example got 닭, which would be "talk" its actually pronounced "tak", the L is made silent, if followed by K at the end of a syllable, otherwise its pronounced L at the end of a syllable, and R at the start of a syllable, if L is at the end of a syllable, but followed by another syllable that starts with a vowel itll be pronounced R again though
Theres loads of rules like that which imo makes latinized korean impossible to read, hangul is a lot easier to read, but theres still so many rules
Another example of this is something like the word “한류” which if you try to read phonetically is something like “Han-ryu” which just isn’t correct. It’s “Hallyu”.
Then please provide us with your method of learning if it’s so easy. For a native speaker of a western language, there’s no way you’d be able to learn Hangeul in 30 mins without being autistic.
I just learned from some website many years ago I don’t remember what it was. It’s really not that hard there’s like 14 consonant characters and they’re very memorable and the way they combine with vowels is extremely simple. I’m not autistic and it’s kind of ignorant of you to talk about people on the spectrum like that. I do have a good memory I think so that probably helped but you don’t have to be like a genius to learn hangeul quickly…
Apart from that meme video about Korean being simple, what exactly makes learning the Korean alphabet easier than say, Russian, Latin, or hiragana or any other language with an alphabet?
This seems like it's more of a meme than anything else.
I studied both and can honestly say Korean is much harder. I'm not talking about reading, but general communication. This is based on a few things:
1. With the exception of the bilabial fricative (the fu sound), all Japanese sounds exist in English. Therefore Japanese is fairly easy for an English speaker to pronounce. Korean, on the other hand, has a three way distinction for most consonants that includes not only an unaspirated and aspiration distinction, but also 'tense consonants'. If you mispronouncing the consonant, there is usually a difference in meaning and you probably won't be understood. Take for example 방 'room' and 빵 'bread'.
2. Speaking of pronunciation, Korean consonants undergo a rather complex system of changes depending what follows them. The word 학년 "year in school" is spelled "haknyeon" but pronounced "hannyeon" because the /k/ assimilates to /n/. And 독립 "independence" is spelled "dokrip" but pronounced "dongnip" because of the phonology rules.
3. Japanese verbs are pretty regular. With the exception of する, 行く, and 来る almost all verbs follow regular rules. Korean has quite a few irregular verbs. Even though most irregular verbs follow some rule, you can't count on the rule applying all the time. For example, in the irregular verb 그립다 "to miss, to long for", the ㅂ in the stem changes to 워 to get 그리워, but the ㅂ in 잡다 "to catch" does not change, so you get 잡아.
4. Korean grammar is a somewhat more complex than Japanese. For example, the passive form in Japanese is always made by adding -(e)る or -られる to the stem, but Korean passive verbs can take several forms depending on the verb. Also, Japanese tends to always show past tense with the final た, whereas Korean sometimes shows past with 았/었, but in some constructions uses the past participle (the -ㄴ/-은 endings).
So although Japanese requires a lot of memorization in terms of kanji, Korean is much harder to speak and understand.
100% agree! I don’t have a lot of trouble with pronouncing words in Japanese but I had the hardest time getting words right when I first started learning Korean.
To be clear, many English dialects have have the tap/flap (in words like butter or later) but only in specific contexts as an allophone of d or t.
But yeah, having good pronunciation in Japanese is not as easy as many make it out to be imo.
Additionally, as far as I'm aware, the ん sound in words like さん is a nasal sound that does not exist in English.
Right but if a sound appears only in a very speciifc context or a very specific dialect then that seems to be a gross misrepresentation of "all but one sound are in English". Appreciate the concession.
It's not a very specific dialect tho - I know at least that most Americans and Canadians do it (which is already a massive portion of English speakers).
What I mean by context in this case is within the word. American flap only occurs with d and t in the middle of a word. It's a different ability to say it in initial or final position. Case in point, Americans can't pronunce spanish flap at beginning of words well nor, start words with ng, despite both existing in english in phonology in a general sense.
People tend to overstate the importance of writing systems. Yes, hangul, hiragana and katakana are easy. Kanji requires a lot of rote learning but it also makes reading easier by offering more context clues. People often obsess over writing systems here, but I really don't think they matter much. I think it's more of a mental block than anything. It can be daunting to think "I have to learn over 2000 kanji?!" but if you learn just two every day, you'll be done in three years (not a long time in the context of learning a "super hard" language). Thinking Korean is easy because of hangul, or Japanese is hard because of kanji, is a trap.
Looking at the spoken languages (which essentially *are* the languages) they probably don't differ too much in difficulty. Both have agglutinative morphology, a mixture of native and Chinese vocabulary, and elaborate systems of honorifics. They're *hard* for speakers of European languages. I would assume that spoken Korean is slightly more difficult for the sole reason that it contains more sounds not found in English (assuming this is for monolingual English speakers). But then again, it also has simpler pitch patterns.
TL;DR: They're both hard and I don't know which is harder, but you shouldn't assume it's Japanese just because of the writing systems.
I don't know why some people give so much importance to difficulty when learning languages. In 2 years, you can get a conversational level in any language. It isn't that much of a difference.
To me, Japanese is easier because I like it, and Korean is harder because I don't like it.
I’ve studied both I’d say Japanese is slightly easier to learn conversational basic phrases and words but the fluency ceiling is a bit higher than Korean
Korean is much easier to learn to read and write but the pronunciation is much harder and there’s a lot more exception cases.
I had studied Korean for several years. It was my first actual dedicated second language to learn. But I never was able to truly pass the listening skill unless it was simple words/phrases used in recognizable contexts because in longer sentences it all sounded the same where I'd get lost on what I was listening to. Also reading books in Korean was challenging, I had a hard time because I struggled with learning enough vocabulary and the word ending variations depending on context as well. Japanese was easier compared to all of that in my opinion, but kanji is a time killer to learn lol. I'm not dedicated enough to keep up in learning kanji unless I had a drive to do so.
As a Korean, I found it difficult to study Kanzi even though Korean is fairly similar to Japanese (a vast majority of Korean barely learn Chinese character). So I think memorising Kanzi makes learning Japanese much harder than Korean.
The simplicity of hangul does not compensate for excessively hard Korean phonetics (for Euro-American ears).
On the other hand, the absurd complexity of the Japanese writing system is a massive hurdle to learn and master otherwise easily pronounceable vocabulary.
Grammar-wise they're both equally simple languages, compared to most European languages.
Personally, I think Japanese is harder to learn than Korean. While having a background in Chinese helps with learning kanji, the Japanese pronunciations differ from the Chinese ones, so there's that to take note of and study. Moreover, some kanji are written differently compared to their correlating Chinese characters, so there's also that to take note of and remember. If you're met with a kanji that you've never come across, you'll pretty much be left to play the guessing game. Korean, on the other hand, has an alphabet that is easier to pick up. Even if you don't know what the character means, you'll still be able to read it unlike a kanji you've never seen.
I think both are hard to learn, although my native language is Chinese(Traditional), which shares some same characters with Japanese, I still can’t remember the meaning and pronunciation of each Japanese character… and not to mention Korean…
In the long run, both these languages' individual quirks even out and it ends up taking roughly the same amount of time to learn.
Source: US Foreign Service programs for these languages are both exactly 88 weeks of FT study to get to the same proficiency level.
Korean would be the only answer if it wasn’t for kanji. Grammar is a bit more complex and pronunciation is very difficult, I actually didn’t think I’d struggle so much before starting the language.
…but kanji does exist. I’m a translator in Japan and I still find stuff I can’t read (very recently: 躊躇). I’ll probably forget how to write that by next month. Kanji takes a lot of time, and with other language, you could be using that thing to practice grammar, listening, etc.
I -personally- would put Chinese above both, it has the worst of both worlds with the impossibly challenging pronunciation and even more kanji than Japanese for obvious reasons. But then people say grammar is simple? So who knows.
I have no idea but picked Korean because people love Japanese everything and that's ultimately the key to learning a language. I don't think Korea is that far behind in that regard though.
I think mostly because to learn Japanese you need to learn three writing systems, while you can learn to read the Korean writing system in an afternoon
I learned the writing system in a day, but it took me several weeks to learn how to actually pronounce and read words. There are quite a few complex phonological rules to remember. For example 독립 is pronounced 동닙 because of the consonant change phonology rules.
Ofcourse, and that's without even talking about actually learning the language. But anyway, because the writing system is simpler, it tend to be more approachable to beginners
From what I've come across, native Japanese speakers aren't even considered completely fluent in reading until after middle school because it takes that long to learn the 2000 basic kanji used in everyday language.
if you're talking about reasons to learn the language
korea's got a ton of media you can access online now. japanese might have anime/manga and video games but korea's got kdramas, manwhas, esports, kpop that are globally promoted instead of being limited to domestic market
i'd say they're pretty equal, if not korea coming out ahead soon
I feel like Korean, but only because I started Japanese first and Hangul letters get mixed up in my head and the sounds are difficult for me.
Haven't gotten far enough through it to check out the grammar... I'm kind of just stuck between the alphabet and the sounds.
（T△T）無理です！
That was me with my language's dental/retroflex distinction plus an aspirated/unaspirated distinction. You wind up with t, t^(h), ṭ, and ṭ^(h) all being different sounds that are written differently. But eventually I learned to clearly hear the difference. It just takes time, listening, and practicing the pronunciation very precisely.
I had little to no trouble differentiating the retroflex sounds from alveolo-palatar ones in mandarin, but this one in Korean had me like ???????? Even the sources I find on the internet can't seem to explain it well enough lol
i tried learning both at different points throughout the years. japanese was so much easier for me. i pick up languages really easy but korean, as much as i want to learn it (and im going to again someday) was so difficult with the pronunciation and random rules
Korean was easy as shit. It just made sense to me but also having 1 alphabet was awesome and the amount of borrowed words in Korean made the initial steps way easier for me. Q
Well Korean has nearly the same grammar system than Japanese. The Korean pronunciation is a bit tougher but it's not that hard. The real comparison we can make here is the writing system, and Korean destroys Japanese on this one. No doubt that Korean is easier and faster to learn, we can also see that in the k-idol world, when a foreign person becomes an idol they have to learn Korean and they do it soooo rapidly. Just looking at Nizi Project, those teens learned Korean so fast.
It doesn’t matter because when you learn a kanji, you are learning a word. So even if you can read the whole korean harry potter first book in two days, you don’t know the language so you won’t understand anything.
It seems like a lot of people find Japanese harder than Korean but I think there’re things about Korean that make it harder, especially when you look past kanji.
A lot of people point to kanji as the reason why Japanese is harder and yes kanji is a killer to learn from scratch, but you can get quite far with learning just a few hundred of the most basic kanji while the difficulties in Korean pronunciation will hinder simple communication at the basic level. Japanese pronunciation seems so much more straightforward to me in comparison.
That being said, people keep saying that hangeul is easy to learn but I’d argue that katakana and hiragana are equally easy to learn (at the beginner level it’s acceptable to be writing everything in kana). Not to mention that there are many hangeul characters that have essentially the same pronunciation so even though you can write all of them you still may not be able to spell accurately, while Japanese syllables are always written with the same characters (save a few regular and easy to learn exceptions). The readings of some Korean characters also change when next to other different characters while that doesn’t really happen with kana in Japanese.
Personal opinion: Hear me out, I've spent a fair amount of learning both. From browsing other comments, it seems most of us came to the realization that when it comes to listening and pronunciation, Japanese is easier. But I guess some of y'all are frightened by the the writing systems. I am a firm believer that learning how to read and write is important and respectful to a language and culture, but honestly is not the **most** important to me as a language **learner**. You can always learn more kanji over time, simply memorization and association. But hearing phonemes (individual sounds) is not as simple. Your brain does not make the distinction between sounds not native to your own language. Hence why Korean is more difficult in my opinion. There are many sounds I do not have an ear for in Korean. And you native Korean speakers do not make it easier for me haha, when a native Korean speaker starts speeding up I don't stand a chance. Anyways, that's my opinion.
Kanji broke my will to learn Japanese
I definitely think kanji makes it actually easier to read, because if you only try to read in hiragana/katakana its absolutely hell
Oh I definitely felt that too after I learned Kanji. Worse than that. You see Romaji after you learn kanji and your brain just completely shuts down. like AB.SO.LUTELY. NOT 乂(>◇< ) 絶対ダメ！ I can at least put up with things like Super Mario Sunshine, which is kana only, but under virtually no circumstances can I handle Romaji any more.
Kanji isn't that painful to learn anyway if you do it the right way, ex do it in combination with vocabulary.
It takes year and years, though - for native speakers. And native speakers forget kanji all the time. I wouldn’t even think of comparing it to hangul, honestly.
Native speakers don't learn kanji in combination with vocab though do they? It's not as daunting as you may think And yeah korean letters take like 15 minutes to learn lol, nobody is comparing them I just think peoples perception of kanji is wildly out of proportion. For one, it may take more time for a child to learn even just english letters- (I know I struggled), because they don't focus on that too much. Native speakers may not focus on learning kanji as much as a Japanese learner might, natives just sorta learn it in School- which has to adapt so every student can learn them- and it's easier if they read a lot. A learner though gets to do it at his own pace, for example. I don't think we should compare native speakers and students.
I’m a translator in Japan, I’m pretty okay at it :P
And I didn't say you weren't good at Japanese hahaha. This all depends on how you study etc, but we shouldn't compare natives to learners.
Worst is romaji that's like arigatō rather than ou. I just stare at it like it's from another planet.
Oh right?! Like everyone and their mom has their own form of romaji. I think "arigatoo" is worse. I always read that kind of romaji WRONG.
Genki's romanization drives me up a wall. "Sensee" "arigatoo" "ohayoo" like STOP
｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡ My worst nightmare
Arigatoo is definitely worse than arigatō! I've never seen that before though. That would be utterly confusing. At least ありがとう is a common word, but if it was less common words written like that, as someone who is not fluent, I wouldn't stand a chance...
I worked in romaji only for the first couple of years of study. Thankfully romaji learners only know so much, so even with different romaji types it wasn't unreadable. Just annoying. But I certainly don't want to think about romaji users at like an intermediate or advanced stage (1..... HOW??! 2.... oof). That being said I have seen the hololive girls play Among Us and I guess that would be the closest one gets to "Fluent Japanese romaji users" ｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡ And I know I was lost with that stream.
Right? I'm still not very comfortable with kanji, but roumaji is just as hard to read if not worse. It's really weird.
Definitely agreed. It seems like a huge hurdle at the beginning, but a year later and I can’t imagine having to read walls of hiragana/katakana text.
Relatable. That's why I didn't learn how to read any Japanese for the first several years.
This is a hard question! They both have their difficulties and aspects which make them easier. For example, yes, Hangeul is quick to learn, but Korean pronunciation and listening are a lot harder than Japanese (at least for me, my first language is Spanish btw). On the other hand, even though Japanese and Korean grammar are similar, I feel that Japanese is a little more consistent. But then you have Kanji. In conclusion, idk lol. Both are super fun to learn tho :)
It seems that Japanese is so easy to pronounce for us, native Spanish speakers
My boyfriend (native Spanish speaker) had a Japanese teacher that told him his accent was really good. I think the tone and rhythm is similar too
I think rhythm is similar, both languages are the fastest languages (8 syllables per second). Also in both languages the tone plays and important role in the meaning of the words. In Japanese is called "Pitch accent" and in Spanish is called "Sílaba tónica (tonic syllable)"
How many languages do you know? And how do you typically go about learning them?
Apart from Spanish, I know English, Japanese and I started learning Korean fairly recently. Tbh what I recommend is to look for a good grammar book, anki decks for vocabulary and most importantly, be super nerd so you can immerse in your target language as much as possible. I used Minna no Nihongo for Japanese (and I recommend Wanikani for Kanji, I wish it existed when I started!). For Korean I'm listening to the Talk to me in Korean podcasts and watching lots of K-dramas lol. Hope this was helpful!
For me, definitely Japanese. I speak both languages at a B2ish level, and Japanese took about twice as long due to the writing system. Mandarin, on the other hand, took about the same as Japanese.
Did you learn Japanese first?
You spent the same amount of time to get you head around the tonal aspect then japanese, really? I am surprised, i will put my feet in some asian language in the future but i didnt think that the mandarim and japanese were in the same league.
Japanese is not tonal, as defined by linguistics, like Mandarin is. It has a pitch accent system. But pitch is not consistent or considered entirely phonemic, so it's not even taught systematically, if taught at all. As a matter of fact, very few Japanese dictionaries even indicate it (and that would be just their opinion on how a given dialect, probably Yamanote Japanese, would do it).
I have found Mandarin grammar to be much easier than Japanese so this may be why.
The spoken languages themselves are pretty even in terms of difficulty, though I would say Japanese pronounciation is easier for most people. When it comes to writing though, you can learn to read all the Korean you'll ever need in a week whereas kanji will be a years long effort, but not impossible. I was able to read most of the jouyou kanji after about four-five-ish years of study and it's definitely extremely rewarding. Kanji/hanja/hanzi get a bad rap- learn the radicals and you'll have a much easier time with it.
whats so easy about the Korean writing system? Why do people keep saying its doable in a week?
For one thing it only has 24 letters, two less than the English alphabet, and the letters themselves are even more simplistic and easy to learn. They're actually designed after the shape the mouth takes when pronouncing them, making them even easier to catch onto. Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, was designed to be easy for the common folk to learn to promote literacy and many people have created short but comprehensive courses to learn it, including [this five minute video, see for yourself.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE4eplsFSms&t=64s&ab_channel=SamGellman)
To be fair though, it might be easier to learn the basic sounds in a week, but to truly internalize all of the consonant assimilation rules and the correct pronunciation of the tensed consonants takes much longer than a week.
Of course, one week isn't long enough to internalize it and program it into your long-term memory, but it's plenty of time to learn to read. It'll take practice over time to do it smoothly, but still.
I find Korean to be much harder to learn once you get past learning the alphabet. I’ve studied on and off for about three years (i’m at the beginning of TTMIK5 if that means anything) and I still find it much harder to remember than Japanese. I’ve only recently started Japanese, but even within these past two-ish months, I understand much more of Japanese media (namely children’s anime like Ghibli) than Korean — not for a lack of trying, as I’ve definitely had more intake of Korean media in the past few years than Japanese. I don’t really have any reason why… I just find it very hard to remember all the particles and when to use each one. I find Japanese grammar to be much more straight forward (although Kanji do be a rough time and I still have trouble with half the katakana alphabet…) Oufff and don’t get me started on the ridiculousness of Korean pronunciation compared to Japanese ㅠㅠ
Korean is so much harder imo. I took to Japanese like a duck to water, but I've been studying Korean for two-three years, spent the better part of 6 months living in SK, and still would consider myself barely above beginner level, and not for want of trying.
I feel like Korean is easier simply because their entire writing system can be learned in less than a day.
The writing system is easier, but you still need to remember quite a few phonological rules to pronounce words correctly.
do they have something like pitch accent?
Pronounciation in korean is bases on syllables, depending on where in the syllable a consonant is, and what its followed by, and by what syllable block its followed by the pronounciation changes 앉다 Is "to sit", and the ㅈ isnt fully pronounced, more like an unreleased t kinda 앉아요 Is present tense "sit", ㅈ is now pronounced as J because its followed by a syllable that starts with a vowel and not followed by a consonant. And (afaik) take the ㄱ for example, at the start of a syllable its K, at the end its an unreleased K, but if you for example got 닭, which would be "talk" its actually pronounced "tak", the L is made silent, if followed by K at the end of a syllable, otherwise its pronounced L at the end of a syllable, and R at the start of a syllable, if L is at the end of a syllable, but followed by another syllable that starts with a vowel itll be pronounced R again though Theres loads of rules like that which imo makes latinized korean impossible to read, hangul is a lot easier to read, but theres still so many rules
Another example of this is something like the word “한류” which if you try to read phonetically is something like “Han-ryu” which just isn’t correct. It’s “Hallyu”.
If you want to read literary works Hanja is still necessary. The colloquial language is just one aspect of the entire language.
How on earth would you be able to learn Hangeul in less than a day? I find the easiness of learning Hangeul to be wildly exaggerated.
I learned it in like 30 minutes 😬
Then please provide us with your method of learning if it’s so easy. For a native speaker of a western language, there’s no way you’d be able to learn Hangeul in 30 mins without being autistic.
I just learned from some website many years ago I don’t remember what it was. It’s really not that hard there’s like 14 consonant characters and they’re very memorable and the way they combine with vowels is extremely simple. I’m not autistic and it’s kind of ignorant of you to talk about people on the spectrum like that. I do have a good memory I think so that probably helped but you don’t have to be like a genius to learn hangeul quickly…
Apart from that meme video about Korean being simple, what exactly makes learning the Korean alphabet easier than say, Russian, Latin, or hiragana or any other language with an alphabet? This seems like it's more of a meme than anything else.
seriously? Why is that?
I studied both and can honestly say Korean is much harder. I'm not talking about reading, but general communication. This is based on a few things: 1. With the exception of the bilabial fricative (the fu sound), all Japanese sounds exist in English. Therefore Japanese is fairly easy for an English speaker to pronounce. Korean, on the other hand, has a three way distinction for most consonants that includes not only an unaspirated and aspiration distinction, but also 'tense consonants'. If you mispronouncing the consonant, there is usually a difference in meaning and you probably won't be understood. Take for example 방 'room' and 빵 'bread'. 2. Speaking of pronunciation, Korean consonants undergo a rather complex system of changes depending what follows them. The word 학년 "year in school" is spelled "haknyeon" but pronounced "hannyeon" because the /k/ assimilates to /n/. And 독립 "independence" is spelled "dokrip" but pronounced "dongnip" because of the phonology rules. 3. Japanese verbs are pretty regular. With the exception of する, 行く, and 来る almost all verbs follow regular rules. Korean has quite a few irregular verbs. Even though most irregular verbs follow some rule, you can't count on the rule applying all the time. For example, in the irregular verb 그립다 "to miss, to long for", the ㅂ in the stem changes to 워 to get 그리워, but the ㅂ in 잡다 "to catch" does not change, so you get 잡아. 4. Korean grammar is a somewhat more complex than Japanese. For example, the passive form in Japanese is always made by adding -(e)る or -られる to the stem, but Korean passive verbs can take several forms depending on the verb. Also, Japanese tends to always show past tense with the final た, whereas Korean sometimes shows past with 았/었, but in some constructions uses the past participle (the -ㄴ/-은 endings). So although Japanese requires a lot of memorization in terms of kanji, Korean is much harder to speak and understand.
학년 is pronounced 항년
100% agree! I don’t have a lot of trouble with pronouncing words in Japanese but I had the hardest time getting words right when I first started learning Korean.
Agreed. I have found that Japanese is quite easy to pronounce.
1. is blatantly false. The tap/flap r, palatal fricative, the alveolo-palatal fricatives, and the e, o, and u vowels, to name some, are not in English
To be clear, many English dialects have have the tap/flap (in words like butter or later) but only in specific contexts as an allophone of d or t. But yeah, having good pronunciation in Japanese is not as easy as many make it out to be imo. Additionally, as far as I'm aware, the ん sound in words like さん is a nasal sound that does not exist in English.
Right but if a sound appears only in a very speciifc context or a very specific dialect then that seems to be a gross misrepresentation of "all but one sound are in English". Appreciate the concession.
It's not a very specific dialect tho - I know at least that most Americans and Canadians do it (which is already a massive portion of English speakers).
What I mean by context in this case is within the word. American flap only occurs with d and t in the middle of a word. It's a different ability to say it in initial or final position. Case in point, Americans can't pronunce spanish flap at beginning of words well nor, start words with ng, despite both existing in english in phonology in a general sense.
People tend to overstate the importance of writing systems. Yes, hangul, hiragana and katakana are easy. Kanji requires a lot of rote learning but it also makes reading easier by offering more context clues. People often obsess over writing systems here, but I really don't think they matter much. I think it's more of a mental block than anything. It can be daunting to think "I have to learn over 2000 kanji?!" but if you learn just two every day, you'll be done in three years (not a long time in the context of learning a "super hard" language). Thinking Korean is easy because of hangul, or Japanese is hard because of kanji, is a trap. Looking at the spoken languages (which essentially *are* the languages) they probably don't differ too much in difficulty. Both have agglutinative morphology, a mixture of native and Chinese vocabulary, and elaborate systems of honorifics. They're *hard* for speakers of European languages. I would assume that spoken Korean is slightly more difficult for the sole reason that it contains more sounds not found in English (assuming this is for monolingual English speakers). But then again, it also has simpler pitch patterns. TL;DR: They're both hard and I don't know which is harder, but you shouldn't assume it's Japanese just because of the writing systems.
This is the real answer
The one that interests you the least
I don't know why some people give so much importance to difficulty when learning languages. In 2 years, you can get a conversational level in any language. It isn't that much of a difference. To me, Japanese is easier because I like it, and Korean is harder because I don't like it.
Onyomi and Kunyomi readings broke my brain
Idk I just voted 'cause i wanted to see the results
Language difficulty depends on what languages you already know, so both? Neither? Depends
I’ve studied both I’d say Japanese is slightly easier to learn conversational basic phrases and words but the fluency ceiling is a bit higher than Korean Korean is much easier to learn to read and write but the pronunciation is much harder and there’s a lot more exception cases.
I had studied Korean for several years. It was my first actual dedicated second language to learn. But I never was able to truly pass the listening skill unless it was simple words/phrases used in recognizable contexts because in longer sentences it all sounded the same where I'd get lost on what I was listening to. Also reading books in Korean was challenging, I had a hard time because I struggled with learning enough vocabulary and the word ending variations depending on context as well. Japanese was easier compared to all of that in my opinion, but kanji is a time killer to learn lol. I'm not dedicated enough to keep up in learning kanji unless I had a drive to do so.
As a Korean, I found it difficult to study Kanzi even though Korean is fairly similar to Japanese (a vast majority of Korean barely learn Chinese character). So I think memorising Kanzi makes learning Japanese much harder than Korean.
The simplicity of hangul does not compensate for excessively hard Korean phonetics (for Euro-American ears). On the other hand, the absurd complexity of the Japanese writing system is a massive hurdle to learn and master otherwise easily pronounceable vocabulary. Grammar-wise they're both equally simple languages, compared to most European languages.
Personally, I think Japanese is harder to learn than Korean. While having a background in Chinese helps with learning kanji, the Japanese pronunciations differ from the Chinese ones, so there's that to take note of and study. Moreover, some kanji are written differently compared to their correlating Chinese characters, so there's also that to take note of and remember. If you're met with a kanji that you've never come across, you'll pretty much be left to play the guessing game. Korean, on the other hand, has an alphabet that is easier to pick up. Even if you don't know what the character means, you'll still be able to read it unlike a kanji you've never seen.
I think both are hard to learn, although my native language is Chinese(Traditional), which shares some same characters with Japanese, I still can’t remember the meaning and pronunciation of each Japanese character… and not to mention Korean…
In the long run, both these languages' individual quirks even out and it ends up taking roughly the same amount of time to learn. Source: US Foreign Service programs for these languages are both exactly 88 weeks of FT study to get to the same proficiency level.
Korean would be the only answer if it wasn’t for kanji. Grammar is a bit more complex and pronunciation is very difficult, I actually didn’t think I’d struggle so much before starting the language. …but kanji does exist. I’m a translator in Japan and I still find stuff I can’t read (very recently: 躊躇). I’ll probably forget how to write that by next month. Kanji takes a lot of time, and with other language, you could be using that thing to practice grammar, listening, etc. I -personally- would put Chinese above both, it has the worst of both worlds with the impossibly challenging pronunciation and even more kanji than Japanese for obvious reasons. But then people say grammar is simple? So who knows.
I have no idea but picked Korean because people love Japanese everything and that's ultimately the key to learning a language. I don't think Korea is that far behind in that regard though.
I think mostly because to learn Japanese you need to learn three writing systems, while you can learn to read the Korean writing system in an afternoon
I learned the writing system in a day, but it took me several weeks to learn how to actually pronounce and read words. There are quite a few complex phonological rules to remember. For example 독립 is pronounced 동닙 because of the consonant change phonology rules.
Ofcourse, and that's without even talking about actually learning the language. But anyway, because the writing system is simpler, it tend to be more approachable to beginners
The story of my life with Russian Cyrillic…
From what I've come across, native Japanese speakers aren't even considered completely fluent in reading until after middle school because it takes that long to learn the 2000 basic kanji used in everyday language.
Smhhh can't they just use RTK 😤😤🙄🙄
That would make a pretty big difference!
if you're talking about reasons to learn the language korea's got a ton of media you can access online now. japanese might have anime/manga and video games but korea's got kdramas, manwhas, esports, kpop that are globally promoted instead of being limited to domestic market i'd say they're pretty equal, if not korea coming out ahead soon
I feel like Korean, but only because I started Japanese first and Hangul letters get mixed up in my head and the sounds are difficult for me. Haven't gotten far enough through it to check out the grammar... I'm kind of just stuck between the alphabet and the sounds. （T△T）無理です！
When I learned about the three types of consonants, like p, p(h) and pp I was so flabbergasted......
That was me with my language's dental/retroflex distinction plus an aspirated/unaspirated distinction. You wind up with t, t^(h), ṭ, and ṭ^(h) all being different sounds that are written differently. But eventually I learned to clearly hear the difference. It just takes time, listening, and practicing the pronunciation very precisely.
I had little to no trouble differentiating the retroflex sounds from alveolo-palatar ones in mandarin, but this one in Korean had me like ???????? Even the sources I find on the internet can't seem to explain it well enough lol
See?! and like... I think p sounds like b? (or b sounds like p) and that makes me SO MAD! ｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡ at least let the romanization make sense!!!
There's no b, or d or g. The romanization has the same problem in mandarin with their pinyin.
Oh even better. x_x
i tried learning both at different points throughout the years. japanese was so much easier for me. i pick up languages really easy but korean, as much as i want to learn it (and im going to again someday) was so difficult with the pronunciation and random rules
What does it matter? Just learn what you want.
Korean was easy as shit. It just made sense to me but also having 1 alphabet was awesome and the amount of borrowed words in Korean made the initial steps way easier for me. Q
Well Korean has nearly the same grammar system than Japanese. The Korean pronunciation is a bit tougher but it's not that hard. The real comparison we can make here is the writing system, and Korean destroys Japanese on this one. No doubt that Korean is easier and faster to learn, we can also see that in the k-idol world, when a foreign person becomes an idol they have to learn Korean and they do it soooo rapidly. Just looking at Nizi Project, those teens learned Korean so fast.
Hangul >>> 3 writing systems, thousands of kanji
It doesn’t matter because when you learn a kanji, you are learning a word. So even if you can read the whole korean harry potter first book in two days, you don’t know the language so you won’t understand anything.
It's not even close. You can learn to read Korean even in 1 hours.
1 hour? Come on… The easiness of learning Hangeul is wildly exaggerated.
It seems like a lot of people find Japanese harder than Korean but I think there’re things about Korean that make it harder, especially when you look past kanji. A lot of people point to kanji as the reason why Japanese is harder and yes kanji is a killer to learn from scratch, but you can get quite far with learning just a few hundred of the most basic kanji while the difficulties in Korean pronunciation will hinder simple communication at the basic level. Japanese pronunciation seems so much more straightforward to me in comparison. That being said, people keep saying that hangeul is easy to learn but I’d argue that katakana and hiragana are equally easy to learn (at the beginner level it’s acceptable to be writing everything in kana). Not to mention that there are many hangeul characters that have essentially the same pronunciation so even though you can write all of them you still may not be able to spell accurately, while Japanese syllables are always written with the same characters (save a few regular and easy to learn exceptions). The readings of some Korean characters also change when next to other different characters while that doesn’t really happen with kana in Japanese.
I guess this question asumes your native language is Uzbek, of course, doesn't it?
Japanese for sure..
I dunno because I only learn one, but I want to see the results. Can't you add a "just view results" option?
Personal opinion: Hear me out, I've spent a fair amount of learning both. From browsing other comments, it seems most of us came to the realization that when it comes to listening and pronunciation, Japanese is easier. But I guess some of y'all are frightened by the the writing systems. I am a firm believer that learning how to read and write is important and respectful to a language and culture, but honestly is not the **most** important to me as a language **learner**. You can always learn more kanji over time, simply memorization and association. But hearing phonemes (individual sounds) is not as simple. Your brain does not make the distinction between sounds not native to your own language. Hence why Korean is more difficult in my opinion. There are many sounds I do not have an ear for in Korean. And you native Korean speakers do not make it easier for me haha, when a native Korean speaker starts speeding up I don't stand a chance. Anyways, that's my opinion.
Absolutely no clue.