Unlike Japanese and Chinese, Korean script uses a phonetic alphabet which consists of 24 basic 'letters' (two fewer than English). There are 14 consonants and 10 vowels that can be combined to make all the sounds in the language.
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.
The shapes of the symbols in Hangul are based on the physical actions you need to make to produce that sound. This makes them easy to remember! For example, the symbol ㄱ (romanised as 'g' or 'k') represents the back of the tongue pressed up against the speaker's soft palate.
Do you want to learn to read the Korean alphabet? While speaking Korean can be quite challenging, the Korean alphabet is actually really easy to learn.
The good news is that learning Hangul is relatively easy; it can take you 90 minutes to get the basics down. After 1 week, you should have a solid understanding of this alphabet.
With 20 minutes of daily study, it would take 20 years to reach Korean fluency. If you raise your study time to just 1 hour every day, you'll learn Korean in roughly 6.5 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Korean is considered to be much easier than Japanese. There are more letters in the Japanese alphabet than in Korean. Japanese also contains more complicated Chinese characters and difficult grammar.
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.
Japanese is slightly easier to learn. But, Chinese is much more widely spoken. Both languages have their pros and cons. Ultimately whichever language pulls on your heartstrings the most is the winner.
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.
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.
No, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are not the same language. They are all part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, but they are not mutually intelligible. Japanese and Korean are more similar to each other than Chinese, but all three languages have significant differences in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.
Diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) were formally established on July 1986. Before then, the PRC recognized only the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) while South Korea in turn recognized only the Republic of China (Taiwan).
The Thai language may be easy to learn for Chinese speakers because of the similar tones that help them understand faster, but it seems hard for English speakers to learn. If a learner wants to take a class to learn Thai, I always recommend starting with writing lessons.
English is taught in Chinese schools, so most Mandarin speakers are familiar with English and the Latin script that makes up the English alphabet. Languages that don't use a Latin script, though, tend to give Mandarin speakers the most trouble. Arabic is a language most Mandarin speakers will find challenging.
No, they can't. Korean and Chinese can't understand each other. They have a distinctive language family, Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan (also known as Trans-Himalayan family) while Korean is a Koreanic language (consisting of the modern Korean language collectively with extinct primeval relatives).
Challenge #2: Replacing V with B, and F with P
Korean doesn't have V and F sounds so they tend to replace them with B and P that exist in Korean. For example, a word like 'vet' might be pronounced as 'bet', and a word like 'fine' might be pronounced as 'pine'.
Prosody (stress and pitch): Korean is a syllable-timed language. Each syllable in the Korean language is distinctly produced, with equal stress. By contrast, English is a stress-timed language. Like English and Japanese, and unlike standard Chinese, Korean is not a tonal language.
While Seoul is the modern capital city of South Korea, many locals aren't fluent in English. It's generally not a very widely spoken language in South Korea. However, you'll have better luck finding a local who can speak English in main tourist neighborhoods, such as Myeongdong, Dongdaemun and Hongdae.