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.
Vietnamese has a notoriously difficult learning curve for the pronunciation factor. Korean's writing system is very simplified and you can pick it up fairly quickly.
Vietnamese is considered a complicated language to learn for English speakers because of its six tones, intricate sounds, fast speech, and complicated pronoun system. On the contrary, learners who speak other tonal languages will not find it as difficult. Vietnamese grammar is relatively simple.
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.
Vietnamese. Why it's hard: Vietnamese is a tonal language with six different tones that dictate the meaning of a word. The high number of vowel sounds also prove difficult for English speakers to nail down.
In general, with just 30 minutes a day, you can study enough to pass the 100-word, 300-word, 500-word, 1,000-word, 2,000-word, and 3,000-word mark in Vietnamese. It's possible to become proficient in the language by the end of the first year if you study every day.
According to the US's Foreign Service Institute (FSI), for a native English speaker to be proficient in Vietnamese, it would take approximately 1,110 class hours. This means that if you dedicate 1 hour every day, 7 days a week to learn Vietnamese, you will be proficient after 40 months (~3 years).
That said, various reasons make Korean more difficult than other languages. Apart from its very different grammar style from other languages, it also uses extremely foreign vocabulary. Plus, there are honorifics and delicate nuances to its conjugation. As a result, this makes it more confusing.
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”.
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.
Since ancient times, Thai and Vietnamese have been affecting each other. Both the languages have been heavily influenced by Chinese vocabulary so they may sound similar. Their shared history is why the two languages seem identical to most people.
Learning Vietnamese is worthwhile if you plan to travel to Vietnam or stay there for a while. This is because few Vietnamese people can speak English in Vietnam.
Vietnamese is easier than Thai. The use of the Latin alphabet is easier to learn and start reading. The pronunciation and grammar are similar and take an equal amount of time to learn. The Thai alphabet has a more significant learning curve and therefore takes longer.
Although Vietnamese and South-Korean cultures have their own nuances, there are several similarities. The Vietnamese and South Korean food culture relies heavily on rice which is a staple ingredient that almost no meals can go without. In addition to rice, noodles and different soups are very popular.
Vietnamese has often been described as sounding like birdsong because of its expressive flourishes and the way it seems to flutter along like the wings of a hummingbird. For foreigners who are just starting to learn the language, it sounds like a hopelessly incomprehensible stream of emotionally-charged music.
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.
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.
However, due to the sheer volume of English speakers who want to learn Mandarin or Japanese, there are more resources for those languages. From that practical standpoint, learners might find that the hardest language to learn of the three is Korean.
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.
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.
Studying the Korean language or any foreign language will widen your vocabulary. This will enable you to talk and connect with more than 75 million people. These people are not just limited to the South Korean population but worldwide. More connections, more horizons, and opportunities will be opened.
According to statistics, more than 50% of Vietnamese people speak English. This percentage is much higher if we talk about the most tourist places.
As a percentage of the total population, the largest share of around 87 percent is in Vietnam. A total of about 86.5 million people worldwide speak Vietnamese as their mother tongue.
Vietnamese is the sole official and national language of Vietnam. It is the first language of the majority of the Vietnamese population, as well as a first or second language for the country's ethnic minority groups.