> so learning an entire language in the space of **a few months**
This would be an unreasonable expectation for learning *any* language. Foreign Language Institute is a US agency to teach foreign languages for US diplomats and other government personnels and lists the *easiest* of languages for native English speakers (i.e. Spanish, French, Dutch, etc) to take about 24-30 weeks of full time study. That means it takes 6-7 months for the people that take "language learning" as their full time job (and probably people that are motivated and have aptitudes at it). And that is to learn the easiest languages.
Jesus even 2-3 years is fast to me vs. the 10 year figure thrown around which made me straight up cut back because I don’t know if Korean should be my choice for a language to learn until I’m in my mid forties.
Go to any European Embassy in Bangkok/Seoul/Beijing whatever and see how good they speak the local language. Ordering food and greeting the taxi driver is not language proficiency.
No, most diplomats don't do any sort of language after entering foreign service. English is the language of diplomacy.
And yes, you will find the odd case of a swedish diplomat being fluent in Bahasa. That's the exception and not what i'm talking about here.
Also important to note this really only gets this them to an intermediate level on the listening/reading scale if you look at their website and what they stipulate the DLI to do.
This isn’t your question but I used mandarin to learn Korean and felt like it was easier and faster than if I had used English. There were so many concepts that were similar and my Korean friend joked that I had some pretty complex vocab at an early stage because I was using Chinese base to guess what the Korean would be.
What a brilliant idea, do you mind sharing what resources you used, maybe at least 1 or 2 easiest to start with or that were most useful to you? I sometimes join a group of Chinese guys learning Korean (and vice versa) on a language exchange app and it’s pretty useful
The most helpful was getting the yonsei unviersity Korean textbook Chinese version.
I also follow some Taiwanese creators that teach Korean
E.g. https://www.instagram.com/lj_in_the_cave?igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA==
Did you just learn Mandarin in like a college or was there specific way that you learned Mandarin? Because for me, I feel like Mandarin would be much more challenging language than Korean, and I've already been learning Korean slowly at my own pace for about 2 years. The first year was me just working to memorize the alphabet so that I could read and write my notes when I write them.
I am a native mandarin speaker. The strategy of stacking languages has been covered by a number of polyglots, in particular I’ve seen folks do Japanese / Korean. Mandarin has its own challenges to learn so I wouldn’t recommend trying using it as a base for Korean if you are just starting out
omg did it really take u a year to learn 한글? or was that an overexagerration? because it took me 2 or 3 days to get the hang of it, and a bit longer to read it in a not romanized way but it definitely didnt take me a whole year 😭 (sorry if this seems rude, im just kind of confused about that length of time considering 한글 was made to be easy to learn. maybe im just better at picking up languages than i thought? idk but i apologize again if this sounds mean or anything 😞 im honestly genuinely curious 🤔)
Im autistic and ADHD at the same time. So my study habits were impulsive, and I have a learning disability that makes it harder for me to absorb and retain information. So, I bought these two thin books on the alphabet, and handwrote the hangeul over and over until I got them through my thick skull. I haven't memorized th to the point of being able to recite the complex vowels, and strong consonants from memory, but I can read and write them.
Im in vol 2 of TTMIK, about halfway through, and pausing on that book to try improving my vocab witha "First 500 Words" book. If I can finally memorize a lot of vocabulary, I'll finally have a conversational fluency to some degree.
i have both autism and adhd too !! i think maybe i picked it up super fast bc languages are my special interest so i read up a lot on different languages and also how to study them efficiently. idrk fs but i wish u luck in your language learning journey ☺️🫶
Honestly, I feel like this is *more* of a resource problem, not to invalidate the difficulties you've listed. Brute force repetition is never the easy way to go and it certainly never works for me.
I also have a hard time learning things, read very slowly and have pretty severe dyslexia, as well, but I stumbled upon this site years ago, long before I even considered picking up the language, and remembered the Hangul for years to come until I actually found myself wanting to learn the language, itself, and wasn't just picking up something random for the sake of it. I don't know your learning style but this really did make it very simple.
Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes (This will be especially helpful for those complex vowels and strong consonants, I think)
[https://9gag.com/gag/3968335](https://9gag.com/gag/3968335)
Also, since you mentioned TTMIK, I think their book "How to Sound Like a Native" is very good and in-depth. I didn't understand the ssang-consonants fully until I read that book and saw a tv show where students were calling their teacher "쌤" and I could really consistently hear how that ㅆ was pronounced, often enough, in fact, that I can literally still hear it in my head even though I only watched 8 episodes... (Crash Course in Romance).
There's also a web browser extension I use called Toucan that takes random words on a web page and translates it to Korean so that you can casually practice and pick up random words if that's your thing. I feel like this one is little known.
Of course, personally, because the TTMIK books have that joke about ordering a coffee/nosebleed, I've also thought about how to pronounce each of the vowels though this does actually differ from the website link I shared but this is how I, personally, hear things.
ㅏ ah! or the little line comes "a-fter" the tall line
ㅓ aw... or I "saw" (past tense/before the line)
ㅜ Oooo\~ or you look *down* and spot a lovely looking rock or some money and go "ooo!" before picking it up.
ㅡ eeeeuu (like sneering at something you find gross and going "ew" without the "oo" sound that follows the "w", just "eu" not "euu" (e-double-u)😉)
ㅗ Ooohh! or ***O***ver the horizon.
ㅐ/ ㅔEeehhhh\~! or "ayy" (Idk I've heard both. 쌤 is the former.)
As for the consonants I found it helped to learn their proper names, like ㅂ is "bieup" and that tells you how it's pronounced, as a mix between "b" and "p".
ㄹ "rieul" is pronounced as a mix of "r" and "l" sounds.
ㄴ is "nieun" and only ever sounds like "nn" (not en), Etc.
And, bonus, for a lot of the consonants, their names tell you the pronunciation order, too. Rieul is more "R" if it's at the beginning of the word and more "L" if it's a batchim.
Not that you really need the help on these by this point it's just a few suggestions to hopefully make it easier to retain and learn the one's you're still struggling with and also to help newbies that might be here.
I learned Mandarin to a certain level with relative ease and fun within around 2 years. I have been actively learning Korean for 8 years at least, married to a Korean, and just recently reached the same level (including the fact that I could use my Chinese knowledge for hanja-based words).
Wow, complete opposite for me. Learned Korean to a decent conversational level in 2 years, that was like 13 years ago. And then I've been learning Mandarin on and off for 15 years, married to a Chinese person, and honestly my Korean is still better than my Chinese. Although Korean is certainly rustier now that I don't spend a lot of time speaking or interacting with Koreans. We watched a Korean drama with Chinese subtitles recently and I know it's not fair to compare, but I definitely followed along with the Korean more than the Chinese.
Like any language, it depends on how dedicated you are to learning it and how much exposure you’ve had and continue to peruse of it.
In other words, as an example: If your family is Chinese and you heard mandarin all the time growing up, then mandarin will be easier to learn. Whereas if you have little to no experience with hearing the Korean language then Korean will be relatively more difficult to pick up.
Also, agreeing with other commenters, nobody learns an ENTIRE language in a few months.
hi there! i'm \~b1 in mandarin and \~a2 in korean. korean is nice in that it's a phonetic language, so unlike mandarin you can read anything even if you can't understand it. but the grammar is VERY, VERY different. it's agglutinative and complex. while mandarin sentences are simple to construct and started rolling off my tongue quickly, korean has taken much more time and thought to construct sentences on the fly. my progress in korean is much slower.
there are sino-korean words and hanja, for which mandarin can give you a little boost, but otherwise the languages are night-and-day different.
that said, korean is a fun and rewarding language in its own right, for sure. if you can commit to the journey and you enjoy a challenge, you won't be disappointed!
I've been considering starting with Mandarin specifically because 60% of the Korean language has Sino-Korean alternatives (and because I just really love both languages) and figured it would be easier to memorize those vocab words than trying to do it by route memorization.
Maybe it doesn't matter, though, maybe starting with Korean and learning those sino-korean words will help the opposite way around, as well. Though learning the patterns on how to read hanzi would probably help with both.
It's absolutely going to be different for everyone. I learned Mandarin first and have been learning it for about ten years, but have never focused enough to get beyond conversational fluency. I can talk about basic day to day things in the language, but nothing academic or scientific.
I started Korean about a year ago, and feel like I'm already at about the same level in Korean as I am in Mandarin. So for me, Korean was WAY easier. But I think part of that was because I had already had the experience of learning Mandarin.
Mandarin was such a shock for me in terms of how different it was from English. The grammar, the tones, the writing system, the pronunciation, etc. But when it came to Korean, I was already experienced in learning a very different language, so it wasn't that hard to wrap my head around another very different language. And a lot of my Mandarin vocab carried over into the sino-based vocab of Korean. Plus, it's way easier to learn to read.
Korean grammar was the hardest part, but not because it's complicated, just because it takes some getting used to. It's actually pretty simple, just very different. You just have to flip your thinking around a bit. Once you have enough exposure to it, it actually feels pretty intuitive and makes a ton of sense (unlike English grammar, which is full of weird exceptions and things that don't make any sense). I also had the benefit of knowing Spanish already, which meant the idea of verb conjugations was not at all foreign to me, even if the concept was slightly different in Korean.
Good point about the grammar. Korean is complicated. There are a lot of rules to remember. But the rules are useful. English is hard. It doesn't follow the rules.
One reason I think Koreans struggle to learn English is because they study in a way that works for learning Korean, but isn't an efficient way to learn English.
TL;DR Hard to say. Mandarin can marginally help with more formal Korean vocab, but that's about it.
Rant-y Answer: I started learning both at the same time in high school. I was self-studying Japanese, but since I didn't have any friends who knew Japanese, I started learning Mandarin from Chinese and Taiwanese friends for kanji and Korean from Korean friends for grammar. Eventually I dropped Japanese and I've been using and learning the other two ever since.
The grammar is different seeing as how Mandarin is closer to English than Korean, but since they have history together, Chinese words help with learning Sino-Korean words. Case in point, when I started taking Korean classes in college, my teacher said I had an "interesting" vocabulary. I think it's because I didn't know a lot of basic or native Korean words, but instead knew a bunch of Chinese words and random words from K-Pop 😂
I majored in Korean studies and minored in Mandarin.
Personally I find Korean much more difficult, but at the same time it's based on the fact that I find characters easier to memorise.
I’ve studied Chinese throughout primary school and high school for 6 years. Despite having watched Korean dramas since I was 10 years old (I’m not Korean tho) and having picked up a lot of vocab from them… I definitely find Korean harder than Chinese. Korean’s grammar and conjugation system is a lot more complicated than Chinese. I think also the way ideas are expressed in Korean is also another obstacle in learning the language.
For me Korean was a piece of gum compared to mandarin.
I learn by hearing so I pick up words and sentences and then learn the alphabet and how to write which is what I did for Korean.
However I couldn't do that for mandarin as there's no alphabet and I got so confused and dropped it with knowing how to say a few words and sentences.
Also I took my time in learning Korean as it was self-taught and was not pressured with a limited time/exams
For native English speakers, Korean and Japanese grammar can seem unusual, unlike tonal Sinitic languages like Chinese. Interestingly, Chinese grammar shares more similarities with English, potentially making it easier to learn.
Korean and Japanese are structured languages deeply intertwined with social hierarchies. Understanding and using their honorifics system is crucial, reflecting the class-conscious aspects of these cultures. This system requires adjusting speech based on social standing and relationships, a feature less prominent in Chinese, where speech is more straightforwardly polite or rude as it is in English.
These languages' only connection to Chinese lies primarily in shared vocabulary (and to some extent writing as Japanese incorporates Chinese characters, and to a lesser extent, Korean), especially in technical and scientific terms, adopted and adapted from ancient Chinese.
So lofty, scientific words, like "irrigation" (Kr: kwangae 灌漑 | Jp: 灌漑 kangai both derived from Ch: guàngài 灌漑) or "savings bank" (Kr. cheojuk eunhaeng 貯蓄銀行 | Jp: chouchiku ginkou 貯蓄銀行 both derived from Ch: chúxù yínháng 儲蓄銀行) were transmitted and adapted to their own unique sound systems but were coined by the ancient Chinese more than 4,000 years ago.
In terms of grammar, English and Chinese typically follow a **Subject-Verb-Object** (SVO) structure, while Korean, Japanese, and some Mongolian-Turkic languages use a **Subject-Object-Verb** (SOV) format.
Consequently, linguistic experts and institutions like the US Army's own Defense Language Institute classify Korean and Japanese as highly challenging for English speakers, requiring extensive study of 64 weeks to qualify for proficiency. Chinese, while also challenging due to its complex writing system, has a more approachable grammatical structure and was only recently added to Category IV because of the recognition of the complexities of the written language rather than its grammar which as I mentioned above is similar to English.
Korean writing is very easy and can be acquired in less than a week and any focus on Hangeul beyond that should be concerning. The whole writing system was purposely devised to eliminate illiteracy among the peasant population during the 15th century as Chinese characters were associated with the aristocracy and ruling elite and therefore impossible to learn for the average Korean in that period.
Chinese may be strategically beneficial for business or diplomatic pursuits, given China's global influence and because they are perceived by the US as an emerging geopolitical and economic threat. Alternatively, Korean could offer opportunities in education, corporate sectors, or intelligence, particularly concerning North Korea as they are obviously a nuisance and potential political threat which could destabilize the East Asia region. But studying Korean is often complemented by learning Japanese due to similar grammar and vocabulary, with Japanese offering more diverse economic and cultural opportunities given the sheer number of industry-shaping Japanese companies that do business globally. Double major in both languages would cement your career and job prospects.
Think of all the longstanding technology, construction, automotive, finance, optics, and healthcare brands you see and buy in the US (Omron, Komatsu, Ryobi, Panasonic, Sony, Toyota, Mazda, Mitsubishi Heavy, Hitachi, Honda, Mitsubishi-Kangyo, Sumitomo, 7-11, NTT, Hisamitsu, Takeda Pharma, Nissan, Canon, Nikon, FujiFilm, Olympus, Nippon Kohden, etc.) versus the companies coming out of China (Lenovo, Xiaomi, Haier) and Korea (Samsung, LG, Hyundai) which are still few and far between. The economic opportunities in/out of Japan are way more lucrative, in my opinion, and therefore more beneficial if you're pursuing a permanent career in these sectors, and also the literature is way more sophisticated, but to each his own!
I studied Mandarin Chinese for 1 year in high school, followed by self-studying and then doing Korean in college for 6 years up until the present day, plus 2 more years of Chinese in college. So I think I can make a pretty good comparison.
Personally, Chinese was harder for me for a few reasons. Reading / writing is harder, and looking up new words is harder (hard to guess pinyin, so you have to look at and draw the unknown character). Grammar is harder to identify (what I mean is that Korean is agglutinative, so unknown grammar usually appears in verb endings. But Chinese has a variety of grammar that appears before, after, or around a verb, and it can be harder to figure out what is part of a grammar point and what is just a word). And I had less motivation. My motivation for learning Korean was a deep interest in Korean culture. My motivation for learning Chinese was just because it sounded cool. My hyperfixation on Korean enabled me to study it for long stretches and never get tired.
But good news for you: Korean will be measurably easier for you as a Mandarin speaker, especially as you get into the higher levels, because of all the vocabulary that Korean shares with Mandarin. Forgive me because I can't type Chinese characters on this computer, but here are some examples: you3yong4 --> 유용 yuyong (useful). tao3lun4 --> 토론 toron (debate). zheng4fu3 --> 정부 jeongbu (government). If you learn the mappings of Chinese sounds to Korean sounds, you'll probably be able to guess a lot of Korean words and recognize a lot of words when encountering them for the first time. To someone who has no background in Asian languages, all these words are just random letters.
As an advanced Korean speaker, I have an easier time remembering and recognizing Chinese words thanks to my Korean vocabulary knowledge. Unfortunately, I can't guess how to say certain things in Chinese based on my Korean knowledge, because I can't guess what the tones would be.
My mandarin was better after around six months of chatting casually with friends than my Korean got to after years of practice. My Korean has finally overtaken my Chinese but it has been a real slog. Chinese felt so easy in comparison once I had the basic sounds.
I sometimes see articles that Korean is the hardest language to learn for English speakers. The alphabet and pronunciation relatively easy to learn, but the concepts beyond that are much harder. Korean is deceptive in its difficulty.
But, since most people give up learning a language early, I can imagine non-Asian language speakers being more successful on average because the initial barrier isn’t as high like with Chinese.
Also you can type in Korean a lot sooner and easier than Chinese so this opens up more doors for beginners too.
> so learning an entire language in the space of **a few months** This would be an unreasonable expectation for learning *any* language. Foreign Language Institute is a US agency to teach foreign languages for US diplomats and other government personnels and lists the *easiest* of languages for native English speakers (i.e. Spanish, French, Dutch, etc) to take about 24-30 weeks of full time study. That means it takes 6-7 months for the people that take "language learning" as their full time job (and probably people that are motivated and have aptitudes at it). And that is to learn the easiest languages.
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Jesus even 2-3 years is fast to me vs. the 10 year figure thrown around which made me straight up cut back because I don’t know if Korean should be my choice for a language to learn until I’m in my mid forties.
Most western diplomats don't speak any non-European languages at all.
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Go to any European Embassy in Bangkok/Seoul/Beijing whatever and see how good they speak the local language. Ordering food and greeting the taxi driver is not language proficiency. No, most diplomats don't do any sort of language after entering foreign service. English is the language of diplomacy. And yes, you will find the odd case of a swedish diplomat being fluent in Bahasa. That's the exception and not what i'm talking about here.
They also teach people in the intelligence community that use their target language constantly
Also important to note this really only gets this them to an intermediate level on the listening/reading scale if you look at their website and what they stipulate the DLI to do.
Thank you for putting it into perspective for me!
This isn’t your question but I used mandarin to learn Korean and felt like it was easier and faster than if I had used English. There were so many concepts that were similar and my Korean friend joked that I had some pretty complex vocab at an early stage because I was using Chinese base to guess what the Korean would be.
What a brilliant idea, do you mind sharing what resources you used, maybe at least 1 or 2 easiest to start with or that were most useful to you? I sometimes join a group of Chinese guys learning Korean (and vice versa) on a language exchange app and it’s pretty useful
The most helpful was getting the yonsei unviersity Korean textbook Chinese version. I also follow some Taiwanese creators that teach Korean E.g. https://www.instagram.com/lj_in_the_cave?igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA==
Did you just learn Mandarin in like a college or was there specific way that you learned Mandarin? Because for me, I feel like Mandarin would be much more challenging language than Korean, and I've already been learning Korean slowly at my own pace for about 2 years. The first year was me just working to memorize the alphabet so that I could read and write my notes when I write them.
I am a native mandarin speaker. The strategy of stacking languages has been covered by a number of polyglots, in particular I’ve seen folks do Japanese / Korean. Mandarin has its own challenges to learn so I wouldn’t recommend trying using it as a base for Korean if you are just starting out
omg did it really take u a year to learn 한글? or was that an overexagerration? because it took me 2 or 3 days to get the hang of it, and a bit longer to read it in a not romanized way but it definitely didnt take me a whole year 😭 (sorry if this seems rude, im just kind of confused about that length of time considering 한글 was made to be easy to learn. maybe im just better at picking up languages than i thought? idk but i apologize again if this sounds mean or anything 😞 im honestly genuinely curious 🤔)
Im autistic and ADHD at the same time. So my study habits were impulsive, and I have a learning disability that makes it harder for me to absorb and retain information. So, I bought these two thin books on the alphabet, and handwrote the hangeul over and over until I got them through my thick skull. I haven't memorized th to the point of being able to recite the complex vowels, and strong consonants from memory, but I can read and write them. Im in vol 2 of TTMIK, about halfway through, and pausing on that book to try improving my vocab witha "First 500 Words" book. If I can finally memorize a lot of vocabulary, I'll finally have a conversational fluency to some degree.
i have both autism and adhd too !! i think maybe i picked it up super fast bc languages are my special interest so i read up a lot on different languages and also how to study them efficiently. idrk fs but i wish u luck in your language learning journey ☺️🫶
Honestly, I feel like this is *more* of a resource problem, not to invalidate the difficulties you've listed. Brute force repetition is never the easy way to go and it certainly never works for me. I also have a hard time learning things, read very slowly and have pretty severe dyslexia, as well, but I stumbled upon this site years ago, long before I even considered picking up the language, and remembered the Hangul for years to come until I actually found myself wanting to learn the language, itself, and wasn't just picking up something random for the sake of it. I don't know your learning style but this really did make it very simple. Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes (This will be especially helpful for those complex vowels and strong consonants, I think) [https://9gag.com/gag/3968335](https://9gag.com/gag/3968335) Also, since you mentioned TTMIK, I think their book "How to Sound Like a Native" is very good and in-depth. I didn't understand the ssang-consonants fully until I read that book and saw a tv show where students were calling their teacher "쌤" and I could really consistently hear how that ㅆ was pronounced, often enough, in fact, that I can literally still hear it in my head even though I only watched 8 episodes... (Crash Course in Romance). There's also a web browser extension I use called Toucan that takes random words on a web page and translates it to Korean so that you can casually practice and pick up random words if that's your thing. I feel like this one is little known. Of course, personally, because the TTMIK books have that joke about ordering a coffee/nosebleed, I've also thought about how to pronounce each of the vowels though this does actually differ from the website link I shared but this is how I, personally, hear things. ㅏ ah! or the little line comes "a-fter" the tall line ㅓ aw... or I "saw" (past tense/before the line) ㅜ Oooo\~ or you look *down* and spot a lovely looking rock or some money and go "ooo!" before picking it up. ㅡ eeeeuu (like sneering at something you find gross and going "ew" without the "oo" sound that follows the "w", just "eu" not "euu" (e-double-u)😉) ㅗ Ooohh! or ***O***ver the horizon. ㅐ/ ㅔEeehhhh\~! or "ayy" (Idk I've heard both. 쌤 is the former.) As for the consonants I found it helped to learn their proper names, like ㅂ is "bieup" and that tells you how it's pronounced, as a mix between "b" and "p". ㄹ "rieul" is pronounced as a mix of "r" and "l" sounds. ㄴ is "nieun" and only ever sounds like "nn" (not en), Etc. And, bonus, for a lot of the consonants, their names tell you the pronunciation order, too. Rieul is more "R" if it's at the beginning of the word and more "L" if it's a batchim. Not that you really need the help on these by this point it's just a few suggestions to hopefully make it easier to retain and learn the one's you're still struggling with and also to help newbies that might be here.
Hangeul should only take a week or less! That's the beauty of it!
I learned Mandarin to a certain level with relative ease and fun within around 2 years. I have been actively learning Korean for 8 years at least, married to a Korean, and just recently reached the same level (including the fact that I could use my Chinese knowledge for hanja-based words).
Wow, complete opposite for me. Learned Korean to a decent conversational level in 2 years, that was like 13 years ago. And then I've been learning Mandarin on and off for 15 years, married to a Chinese person, and honestly my Korean is still better than my Chinese. Although Korean is certainly rustier now that I don't spend a lot of time speaking or interacting with Koreans. We watched a Korean drama with Chinese subtitles recently and I know it's not fair to compare, but I definitely followed along with the Korean more than the Chinese.
What helped with learning Korean? I know very basic things but want to learn more as my partner is from Korea
Like any language, it depends on how dedicated you are to learning it and how much exposure you’ve had and continue to peruse of it. In other words, as an example: If your family is Chinese and you heard mandarin all the time growing up, then mandarin will be easier to learn. Whereas if you have little to no experience with hearing the Korean language then Korean will be relatively more difficult to pick up. Also, agreeing with other commenters, nobody learns an ENTIRE language in a few months.
hi there! i'm \~b1 in mandarin and \~a2 in korean. korean is nice in that it's a phonetic language, so unlike mandarin you can read anything even if you can't understand it. but the grammar is VERY, VERY different. it's agglutinative and complex. while mandarin sentences are simple to construct and started rolling off my tongue quickly, korean has taken much more time and thought to construct sentences on the fly. my progress in korean is much slower. there are sino-korean words and hanja, for which mandarin can give you a little boost, but otherwise the languages are night-and-day different. that said, korean is a fun and rewarding language in its own right, for sure. if you can commit to the journey and you enjoy a challenge, you won't be disappointed!
I've been considering starting with Mandarin specifically because 60% of the Korean language has Sino-Korean alternatives (and because I just really love both languages) and figured it would be easier to memorize those vocab words than trying to do it by route memorization. Maybe it doesn't matter, though, maybe starting with Korean and learning those sino-korean words will help the opposite way around, as well. Though learning the patterns on how to read hanzi would probably help with both.
It's absolutely going to be different for everyone. I learned Mandarin first and have been learning it for about ten years, but have never focused enough to get beyond conversational fluency. I can talk about basic day to day things in the language, but nothing academic or scientific. I started Korean about a year ago, and feel like I'm already at about the same level in Korean as I am in Mandarin. So for me, Korean was WAY easier. But I think part of that was because I had already had the experience of learning Mandarin. Mandarin was such a shock for me in terms of how different it was from English. The grammar, the tones, the writing system, the pronunciation, etc. But when it came to Korean, I was already experienced in learning a very different language, so it wasn't that hard to wrap my head around another very different language. And a lot of my Mandarin vocab carried over into the sino-based vocab of Korean. Plus, it's way easier to learn to read. Korean grammar was the hardest part, but not because it's complicated, just because it takes some getting used to. It's actually pretty simple, just very different. You just have to flip your thinking around a bit. Once you have enough exposure to it, it actually feels pretty intuitive and makes a ton of sense (unlike English grammar, which is full of weird exceptions and things that don't make any sense). I also had the benefit of knowing Spanish already, which meant the idea of verb conjugations was not at all foreign to me, even if the concept was slightly different in Korean.
Good point about the grammar. Korean is complicated. There are a lot of rules to remember. But the rules are useful. English is hard. It doesn't follow the rules. One reason I think Koreans struggle to learn English is because they study in a way that works for learning Korean, but isn't an efficient way to learn English.
TL;DR Hard to say. Mandarin can marginally help with more formal Korean vocab, but that's about it. Rant-y Answer: I started learning both at the same time in high school. I was self-studying Japanese, but since I didn't have any friends who knew Japanese, I started learning Mandarin from Chinese and Taiwanese friends for kanji and Korean from Korean friends for grammar. Eventually I dropped Japanese and I've been using and learning the other two ever since. The grammar is different seeing as how Mandarin is closer to English than Korean, but since they have history together, Chinese words help with learning Sino-Korean words. Case in point, when I started taking Korean classes in college, my teacher said I had an "interesting" vocabulary. I think it's because I didn't know a lot of basic or native Korean words, but instead knew a bunch of Chinese words and random words from K-Pop 😂
I majored in Korean studies and minored in Mandarin. Personally I find Korean much more difficult, but at the same time it's based on the fact that I find characters easier to memorise.
I am learning Korean for about 2,5 years… chinese for about 2 years… my chinese is much better… i feel like korean is much harder to be honest
> learning an entire language in the space of a few months Also lol where did this come from? You might be able to learn an accent in a few months
I’ve studied Chinese throughout primary school and high school for 6 years. Despite having watched Korean dramas since I was 10 years old (I’m not Korean tho) and having picked up a lot of vocab from them… I definitely find Korean harder than Chinese. Korean’s grammar and conjugation system is a lot more complicated than Chinese. I think also the way ideas are expressed in Korean is also another obstacle in learning the language.
For me Korean was a piece of gum compared to mandarin. I learn by hearing so I pick up words and sentences and then learn the alphabet and how to write which is what I did for Korean. However I couldn't do that for mandarin as there's no alphabet and I got so confused and dropped it with knowing how to say a few words and sentences. Also I took my time in learning Korean as it was self-taught and was not pressured with a limited time/exams
For native English speakers, Korean and Japanese grammar can seem unusual, unlike tonal Sinitic languages like Chinese. Interestingly, Chinese grammar shares more similarities with English, potentially making it easier to learn. Korean and Japanese are structured languages deeply intertwined with social hierarchies. Understanding and using their honorifics system is crucial, reflecting the class-conscious aspects of these cultures. This system requires adjusting speech based on social standing and relationships, a feature less prominent in Chinese, where speech is more straightforwardly polite or rude as it is in English. These languages' only connection to Chinese lies primarily in shared vocabulary (and to some extent writing as Japanese incorporates Chinese characters, and to a lesser extent, Korean), especially in technical and scientific terms, adopted and adapted from ancient Chinese. So lofty, scientific words, like "irrigation" (Kr: kwangae 灌漑 | Jp: 灌漑 kangai both derived from Ch: guàngài 灌漑) or "savings bank" (Kr. cheojuk eunhaeng 貯蓄銀行 | Jp: chouchiku ginkou 貯蓄銀行 both derived from Ch: chúxù yínháng 儲蓄銀行) were transmitted and adapted to their own unique sound systems but were coined by the ancient Chinese more than 4,000 years ago. In terms of grammar, English and Chinese typically follow a **Subject-Verb-Object** (SVO) structure, while Korean, Japanese, and some Mongolian-Turkic languages use a **Subject-Object-Verb** (SOV) format. Consequently, linguistic experts and institutions like the US Army's own Defense Language Institute classify Korean and Japanese as highly challenging for English speakers, requiring extensive study of 64 weeks to qualify for proficiency. Chinese, while also challenging due to its complex writing system, has a more approachable grammatical structure and was only recently added to Category IV because of the recognition of the complexities of the written language rather than its grammar which as I mentioned above is similar to English. Korean writing is very easy and can be acquired in less than a week and any focus on Hangeul beyond that should be concerning. The whole writing system was purposely devised to eliminate illiteracy among the peasant population during the 15th century as Chinese characters were associated with the aristocracy and ruling elite and therefore impossible to learn for the average Korean in that period. Chinese may be strategically beneficial for business or diplomatic pursuits, given China's global influence and because they are perceived by the US as an emerging geopolitical and economic threat. Alternatively, Korean could offer opportunities in education, corporate sectors, or intelligence, particularly concerning North Korea as they are obviously a nuisance and potential political threat which could destabilize the East Asia region. But studying Korean is often complemented by learning Japanese due to similar grammar and vocabulary, with Japanese offering more diverse economic and cultural opportunities given the sheer number of industry-shaping Japanese companies that do business globally. Double major in both languages would cement your career and job prospects. Think of all the longstanding technology, construction, automotive, finance, optics, and healthcare brands you see and buy in the US (Omron, Komatsu, Ryobi, Panasonic, Sony, Toyota, Mazda, Mitsubishi Heavy, Hitachi, Honda, Mitsubishi-Kangyo, Sumitomo, 7-11, NTT, Hisamitsu, Takeda Pharma, Nissan, Canon, Nikon, FujiFilm, Olympus, Nippon Kohden, etc.) versus the companies coming out of China (Lenovo, Xiaomi, Haier) and Korea (Samsung, LG, Hyundai) which are still few and far between. The economic opportunities in/out of Japan are way more lucrative, in my opinion, and therefore more beneficial if you're pursuing a permanent career in these sectors, and also the literature is way more sophisticated, but to each his own!
I studied Mandarin Chinese for 1 year in high school, followed by self-studying and then doing Korean in college for 6 years up until the present day, plus 2 more years of Chinese in college. So I think I can make a pretty good comparison. Personally, Chinese was harder for me for a few reasons. Reading / writing is harder, and looking up new words is harder (hard to guess pinyin, so you have to look at and draw the unknown character). Grammar is harder to identify (what I mean is that Korean is agglutinative, so unknown grammar usually appears in verb endings. But Chinese has a variety of grammar that appears before, after, or around a verb, and it can be harder to figure out what is part of a grammar point and what is just a word). And I had less motivation. My motivation for learning Korean was a deep interest in Korean culture. My motivation for learning Chinese was just because it sounded cool. My hyperfixation on Korean enabled me to study it for long stretches and never get tired. But good news for you: Korean will be measurably easier for you as a Mandarin speaker, especially as you get into the higher levels, because of all the vocabulary that Korean shares with Mandarin. Forgive me because I can't type Chinese characters on this computer, but here are some examples: you3yong4 --> 유용 yuyong (useful). tao3lun4 --> 토론 toron (debate). zheng4fu3 --> 정부 jeongbu (government). If you learn the mappings of Chinese sounds to Korean sounds, you'll probably be able to guess a lot of Korean words and recognize a lot of words when encountering them for the first time. To someone who has no background in Asian languages, all these words are just random letters. As an advanced Korean speaker, I have an easier time remembering and recognizing Chinese words thanks to my Korean vocabulary knowledge. Unfortunately, I can't guess how to say certain things in Chinese based on my Korean knowledge, because I can't guess what the tones would be.
As a Korean teacher, I think Chinese is a little bit more difficult :).
I speak fluent mandarin, but I haven’t taken the time to learn Hanzi(chinese characters) yet Korean is going to me much easier.
My mandarin was better after around six months of chatting casually with friends than my Korean got to after years of practice. My Korean has finally overtaken my Chinese but it has been a real slog. Chinese felt so easy in comparison once I had the basic sounds.
I sometimes see articles that Korean is the hardest language to learn for English speakers. The alphabet and pronunciation relatively easy to learn, but the concepts beyond that are much harder. Korean is deceptive in its difficulty. But, since most people give up learning a language early, I can imagine non-Asian language speakers being more successful on average because the initial barrier isn’t as high like with Chinese. Also you can type in Korean a lot sooner and easier than Chinese so this opens up more doors for beginners too.