English is a difficult language for a Korean.. grammar wise, vocabulary wise, spelling wise, pronunciation wise. Yet it is easy to learn for a person whose mother tongue belongs to the Romance language family and especially for those who already speak a Germanic language.
The phonetic system, pronunciation and the grammatical structure of the two languages are all extremely different. There are many sounds in the English language that simply do not exist in the Korean language, and this causes a multitude of pronunciation difficulties for Korean learners of English.
Sounds such as /f/, /v/, “th” (voiceless, as in “bath”), “th” (voiced, as in “bathe”), /z/, “sh”, “ch”, “zh” (as in “measure” or “vision”), “j” and “r” don't exist in Korean. /b, d/ and /g/ are often unvoiced.
It would vary from person to person, but the top 3 languages most Koreans recognize as being the hardest to learn are Arabic, Russian and Hebrew.
Generally speaking, we might assert that Korean is easier for an English speaker to learn than Mandarin Chinese. But this is very relative. In fact, the US Foreign Service Institute assigns Mandarin Chinese and Korean the same level of difficulty. Both languages are in “Category Four”.
Assuming no previous exposure to any foreign language, the easiest language for a native Korean speaker to learn is most certainly Japanese, because their grammatical structure is extremely similar.
According to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the agency in charge of training US diplomats, it takes a native English speaker 2,200 hours of dedicated study – or 88 weeks – to reach professional working fluency in Korean.
However, considering the larger number of sounds and the different particles in Korean, Japanese is definitely the easier language to start in. If you're not good at distinguishing new sounds and pronunciations, you're definitely going to have a hard time with Korean.
Korean and Japanese might be the easiest languages for a native Chinese speaker to learn. While Korean and Japanese belong to a different language family from Chinese, centuries of cultural exchange have filled Korean and Japanese with Chinese vocabulary, in fact, 60% of Korean vocabulary has Chinese roots.
Korean is last on our list of most difficult languages because it might not be the toughest yet it is the trickiest language with complex grammar rules, own alphabets, sentence structure, and pronunciation. Although learning Korean is on every K-Pop lovers' list these days, it is not a language you can learn easily.
Which language is easier for an English speaker– Korean or Japanese? For an English speaker, Korean is easier to learn. Japanese has a different writing system and grammar than English.
In Korean, the “l” and “r” sounds come from the same underlying consonant ㄹ. If you put your tongue in between making an “l” and making an “r,” you're almost there.
The pronunciation of the Korean alphabets ㅋ, ㄱ, and ㄲ can be complicated for a lot of Korean language learners. These three letters look similar and can sound similar. However, each letter has a distinct sound. Below is a video that will teach you how to pronounce the Korean alphabets ㅋ, ㄱ, and ㄲ.
Relatively, Korean would be an easier language to learn. Thanks to its phonetic alphabet and more simplistic grammar rules, Korean is not the most challenging Asian language to learn. Chinese on the other hand is much more widely spoken. This means that finding study materials and practice partners would be easier.
It is a pretty tricky for native Chinese speakers to learn English, and it is no mean feat to master it. There are so many differences between the languages that without guidance and support, it is very difficult for Chinese speakers to fully grasp English and its intricacies.
The difference is in the alphabet—the Korean alphabet (yes, the alphabet, not characters called hangul, consists of 24 letters. Fourteen of them are consonants and ten vowels. The grammar is a little bit more challenging than Chinese, mainly because of different speech levels.
Indonesian is the easiest Asian language since its writing system is based on the Latin alphabet. However, the Cyrillic script is used for several other Asian languages. It is due to the fact that both Indonesian vocabulary and sentence or grammatical structure are pretty simple.
Riau Indonesian is different from most other languages in how simple it is. There are no endings of any substance, no tones, no articles, and no word order. There is only a little bit of indicating things in time.
How long does it take to learn Korean fluently? It will take about 1200 hours to reach a high intermediate level. You'll need additional practice, so you may want to double that number to 2400 hours to get towards fluency. That would be about 23 hours of study per week for two years.
However, since Korean is the easiest language to read due to its letter-based reading system, that also means Korean is the easiest language to write. You still need to know the grammar, though.
The portion of the Korean population with English Proficiency (EP, speaking English “very well” and speaking another language) has remained more constant at about 43-44%.
It takes about three months or 90 days to learn enough Korean to have at least 3-minute conversations in Korean if you study for 7 to 10 hours per week. Moreover, after one year of looking at this pace, you will become fluent and comfortable with Korean conversation.
Most Koreans under 60 can read English more or less. But only about 10 percent speak some English with broken grammar. Many young Korean students can speak reasonsble English especially the ones who have lived and studied abroad like in the states the uk the Philippines etc. Less than 1 percent may be fluent.