I’ve got this crazy notion that Korean is an easy language to learn. It’s probably just hubris, but I’d like to explore the idea. Mind you, I consider Chinese an easy language, so I may be peculiar to begin with.
At this point, I’ve finished reviewing the first half of the Korean textbook, almost finished review Talk To Me in Korean Level 1, and have 82 crowns in Duolingo. (For more on these, see here). Also, when it occurred to me to download a Korean dictionary on my phone, I also went ahead and picked up a couple other language learning apps to check out.
Why Korean should be hard
- Politeness levels. Korean has several levels of speaking/writing ranging from very informal to very formal. Not only does one have to learn entire sets of grammar for each level, but it is also necessary to use them appropriately depending on who you are speaking to.
- Grammar. Like Chinese, Korean does tend to be “telegraphic,” i.e. leaving a lot of information (especially about the subject of the sentence) to context. However, Korean is highly inflected with the particles attached to the ends of nouns to indicate whether they are the subject, theme, object, location, etc. and endings to verbs reflecting not only politeness level but also tense and aspect.
- Pronunciation. Korean phonology is quite different from English, with more explicit use of unaspirated consonants and a ton of vowels that are rather difficult to distinguish between. Like Japanese, Korean has a fuzzy boundary between “l” and “r” as represented by the letter “ㄹ”. (btw, I’m not familiar with any part of China where there is confusion between “l” and “r”, so if you are going to make racist jokes, at least get the stereotype correct).
- Numbers. Korean uses two sets of numbers: Native Korean numbers and Sino-Korean numbers which were borrowed from China back when “Chinese” sounded more like Cantonese. The native Korean numbers are crazy like English where there is only a murky connection between “two”, “twelve”, and “twenty.” (Unlike Chinese which is uber-logical with the “two”, “ten-two”, and “two-ten”). Some of the numbers also change when paired with measure words. (I believe Japanese also does this, and Chinese only does it for the number 2). Also, measure words!
- Phonological Rules and Coarticulation. So, unlike Chinese where a syllable is a syllable, Korean–despite being written in blocks of syllables–has complicated rules where phonemes shift to the next syllable or change depending on if it is being followed by another syllable or what the next syllable starts with. These rules are even reflected in the grammar where the particles used depend on the sound structure of the word or there are direct spelling changes in the conjugation to make it easier to pronounce. Most European languages do this to, but when it’s your native language you don’t think about it.
Why it is “easy”
Despite all that, I still feel that Korean will be easy to learn. This is primarily do to the fact that Korean not only has an alphabet, but it is a beautifully designed alphabet that seriously only takes a day to learn. (Compare that to the half a semester in college dedicated to learning the Arabic alphabet). Once you have an alphabet you can wander the streets looking at signs and playing your own personal version of “Hooked on Phonics” and this is where the “Korean is easy” notion really kicks in. I’m honestly astounded by how many loan words are floating around, both from English and Chinese. Maybe I’ve been in China too long, where loan words are highly “sinified”, but I really didn’t expect to see so much English. Consider the following vending machine:
A quick little Korean lesson first: 커피 (keo pi) is coffee (“p” usually substitutes for “f”). The top row says 밀크커피 (mil keu coffee) , 살탕 커피 (sal tang coffee),트림 커피 (keu rim coffee), and 블랙 커피 (beul laek coffee). So saltang is the Korean word for sugar, but the other three just sound out milk, cream, and black. I know for a fact that Korean has its own words for milk and black. In fact, milk is available on the bottom row, where it is properly written as 우유 (woo yoo).
I think a lot of the English loan words are just market-level stuff, but the Chinese goes deeper. Riding on the subway, every stop is written in Hangeul (Korean script), hanzi (Chinese characters, though sometimes I feel they are pulling double duty as kanji also), and English. With the hanzi and Korean syllables aligned, one quickly notices that more than 90% of the subway stop names sound a lot like the Chinese, e.g. yongsan instead of longshan, dongdaemun instead of dongdamen. I’m just guessing here, but I think there was an analog of the Norman invasion (which infused English with French vocabulary) between China and Korea.
So, to answer the question is Korean easy? If you already speak English and Chinese, maybe. Being “literate” allows one to engage with much more of the language much quicker, not only can one shortcut a lot of vocabulary by recognizing loan words, the higher volume of linguistic input powers incidental learning.
I have also heard that speaking Korean makes it much easier to learn Japanese.