The FSI puts Korean as a Category V language. Which means, it's one of the hardest languages to master. They estimate 2200 hours of study before you can reach fluency in Korean. Or 88 weeks of extremely intense study.
Korean is one of the easiest Asian languages to learn. Furthermore, the Korean alphabet is made up of 14 consonants and is known as Hangul. Likewise, Korean has ten vowels with symbols that you will combine into syllable blocks for usages. Similarly, another fun fact about Korean, it is an isolated language.
There are no guttural sounds in Korean, like in Arabic or Hebrew. And there are also no consonant clusters, like in Polish or Georgian. But most importantly, Korean is not a tonal language, unlike other East Asian languages. This makes speaking Korean a lot easier.
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.
2. Arabic. Arabic is the queen of poetic languages, the 6th official language of the UN and second on our list of toughest languages to learn.
Unlike other East-Asian languages, Korean isn't a tonal language. This means, that the meaning of the word doesn't change, regardless of what your accent is like. This makes learning Korean much easier than Japanese.
Other people who enjoy grammar and grammar-based languages find Korean the easiest since it doesn't have the complicated Chinese characters, and some weird geniuses may enjoy Japanese the most as it is the most challenging – difficult grammar AND Chinese characters.
Meanwhile, Korean grammar is likely the hardest, while tones in Mandarin are notoriously difficult for native English speakers to hear, and Japanese is the fastest spoken language in the world at over 7 syllables per second.
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”.
Korean is the clear-cut easiest to read and write when compared to Japanese and Chinese, as its alphabet is easier to remember and more logical to Western language speakers.
If your goal of learning a certain language is related with Japanese culture, then Japanese is the best choice. If your goal is Korean culture such as K-pop, K-drama, or some others, then Korean might be the best choice.
Both analyses demonstrated genetic evidence of the origin of Koreans from the central Asian Mongolians. Further, the Koreans are more closely related to the Japanese and quite distant from the Chinese.
The FSI puts Korean as a Category V language. Which means, it's one of the hardest languages to master. They estimate 2200 hours of study before you can reach fluency in Korean. Or 88 weeks of extremely intense study.
Korean language has a lot of connectors and sometimes the sentences can get really lengthy with so many connectors. Your poor brain will be busy figuring out the connectors in the first half of the sentence while your Korean friend would already have spoken 5 more sentences.
Although all Asian languages are relatively harder for English native speakers to learn, Vietnamese is one of the easier one compared to Korean, Chinese, Japanese and so on.
Is Korean hard to learn for English speakers? Learning a language that involves a new writing system and sentence structure (such as Korean) can be challenging for a native English speaker. However, if you set yourself up with the right materials with a learning method you enjoy, it becomes easy.
While the similarities between the two languages are noticeable, Chinese and Korean aren't mutually intelligible. Korean and Chinese people couldn't understand each other if they only used their native language in a conversation. That's because they're from different language families.
But if you're thinking it's like how Portuguese people can understand Spanish most of the time, no. Japanese and Korean are from completely different language families. Japanese people have to study hard if they want to understand Korean.
Most people have embraced the 10,000-word vocabulary as the ideal word count for being fluent in Korean. With this level of language mastery, you will be able to read Korean web pages comfortably and effortlessly. Active memorization requires some effort and practice.
Generally, if you're an English speaker with no exposure to other languages, here are some of the most challenging and difficult languages to learn: Mandarin Chinese. Arabic. Vietnamese.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.