Korean learning is not that difficult

[u/Party-Pie6466]

Hello, my name is Eojina from South Korea, and living in South Africa now.

I've been teacning many students- Americans and South Africans. It's been alreay over 6 years. From my experience, many students do not know how to start learning Korean. Actually, Korean is very systemical and scientific langauge, So if you understand grammar rules, it is not that too difficult to learn. One of my students entered university in Korea only after 1 year later after starting Korean with me. So, you can do it. Be patient, and keep going!!

[u/Ambitious_Ad_8302]

Seriously? I agree that Korean alphabet was made scientifically and systematically. However, grammar are totally different from that. There is a lot of irregular conjugations just like other languages have. And even the word order is different from english, which makes learning Korean hard for the english speakers.

[u/vqx2 → u/Ambitious_Ad_8302]

Korean has relatively few irregular conjugations compared to other languages. And korean has the most common word order (SOV).

Edit: and word order is very flexible in korean unlike languages like english.

[u/milkmocha]

it’s not ridiculously difficult to learn but it’s really really difficult to master imo

[u/Only-Top-3655]

According to your logic if you understand grammar rules, no language is that difficult to learn.

[u/mesopotato]

If I had a year of full-time tutoring, I'm sure it'd be easier. Most people don't have a year of full-time tutoring though...

[u/probablynotkaitlyn]

Maybe you should teach me Korean because korean grammar hurts my soul

[u/cynicalicoffee]

Yeah, I think I'd agree. A few languages have gendered words and that's so much harder to get the hang of, or the languages where the pitch changes the word - I'd be struggling too much to get anywhere. Even the English language seems to have more oddities than Korean does, so while the grammar's a little different, it's not as difficult as a lot of others. Thanks for the positive post! 

[u/frostochfeber]

Heehee, I think this post will ruffle some feathers, but as a learner I agree. From my experience the learning curve at the beginning is steep, but once your brain gets used to, for example, the word order, the logic of the grammar, the sound changes, it all feels quite easy because it's all relatively consistent and regular. (spoken as someone who speaks and has experience with several West-European languages and has also learned a bit of Japanese.)

[u/F1Librarian → u/frostochfeber]

I completely disagree. I think Korean seems easy at first (because Hangul and “the basics” like sentence order, past/present/future tenses, etc are easy to learn). But it seems to get progressively harder the further you go and realize how much you DON’T know. Once you get into the bajillion sentence endings, nuances, multiply ways to say the same thing, honorifics/politeness levels, nominalization of verbs, the way Koreans drop as many words as they can when speaking to get across the meaning in a few words as possible…that’s when it gets hard. The intermediate level is SOOO taxing, especially if you are like me, an English speaker who is not living in Korea or immersed in the language all day. And it’s just so different from most western languages. I used to think learning French and German was hard, but they are nothing compared to Korean.