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.
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.
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.
Korean. 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.
Japanese is the easiest language for Koreans to learn. There're very important points that languages easy to learn as foreign languages have to have: cultural similarity and grammatical similarity.
Linguistic Affiliation
The most prominent of these link Korean to the Altaic languages of central Asia, a family that includes Turkish, Mongolian, and the Tungusic (for example, Manchu) languages of Siberia.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
The truth is that Korean is one of the easiest Asian languages to learn for English speakers. Although Korean ranks as one of the most difficult languages by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), you'll feel incredible ease when it comes to learning Korean grammar compared to other “difficult” foreign languages.
The Japanese language is one of the most popular and beautiful languages in Asia. It is an ancient language of Asia. It is a very musical language.
Thai will get easier as learners progress. Most of the challenges will exist in the beginning - tone, unfamiliar sounds, and reading. However, once a learner begins to acquire these, the language gets easier. Korean, on the other hand, will become more difficult for learners.
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.
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.
Gateway to Korean and Japanese - it would be easier for you to learn Korean and Japanese once you learned Chinese. These three languages all share sino-vocabulary. In Korean its about 60% of the vocabulary.
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.
It's within the top 18 most useful languages in the world, making it a great language to learn regardless of whether you travel for business or pleasure. Plus, the Korean alphabet is super easy to learn.
Duolingo's Korean course covers a good amount of basic words, which is a good starting point. But this course fails to go beyond beginner level, so users shouldn't expect to achieve high level fluency by only using this app.
Similarities between Japanese and Korean
It's very obvious upon listening to people speak both of these languages that they sound different. Speakers of each respective language wouldn't be able to understand each other without some prior knowledge of the other language.
Korean and Japanese grammar and sentence construction are extremely similar. They both share a number of Chinese loanwords, but their original vocabulary and pronunciation are very different, rendering these two languages mutually incomprehensible.