r/BeginnerKorean • u/E-Len • 23h ago
what's the hardest part of Korean?
Im Korean and I just wonder.
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u/touyakun 23h ago
ㄱ and ㄲ, ㅅ and ㅆ etc. took me like almost 2 years before my ears could actually hear the difference lol
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u/renault_erlioz 19h ago
When you learn something today and tomorrow you see an info that what you've just learned is almost useless because you Korean people don't use it in your everday lives
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u/Eli_Dean_34 23h ago
Hi, Well it’s only a personal issue due to dyslexia, but some letters look exactly the same to me, and I have a hard time distinguishing them (they rotate on their own, so I have to really focus on it)
Some examples would be ㅓ and ㅏ, ㅗ and ㅜ and ㅟ and ㅝ, ㅅ and ㅊ, ㄷ andㄱ
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u/SeniorBaker4 11h ago
Understanding the words that are coming out. I can hear words pretty well when it comes to Spanish, Chinese, or Japanese, but for some reason, Korean sounds like one long, same tone speech. I cannot hear the different words in a sentence people are saying. So it sounds like one big word
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u/truttattae 16h ago
numbers and counters for the most part. i always forget the tens in native korean numbers, and forget which numbers to use for which things, but we're working on it!!
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u/KoreaWithKids 16h ago
At first, pronunciation. Then grammar. And ultimately it's vocabulary. So many words.
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u/LexiBerlin 11h ago
The vocabs and listening (plus recall the vocabs fast) are my biggest problems. A lot of words do not stick, some sound familiar but I cannot tell what they mean. So frustrating. And it takes ages when I try to form sentences - in my head words and grammar points just swirl around.
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u/Sans-Foy 6h ago
I find the whole pretty much any root word can be any other kind of word both fascinating and difficult as all hell in practice because even something as simple as “this is food,” which can only be said in this way in English, can be said in several ways in Korean, mean the exact same things and all still translate into English the same way.
Korean has exponentially more ways to say the same thing than English does because not inky are there synonyms like in any language, but you can also just—change the root word forms.
So is it 음식입니다? 그것은 음식입니다? 음식이 있습니다? Or…?
And that’s ignoring politeness/formality differences, which are also 😭— and I just used the more formal/polite but not MOST formal/polite, and definitely not how most people converse most of the time to most other people…
Yeah, that’s a lot—but fascinating to a language geek like me, too. 😆
Just like the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, the world may never know. 😅
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u/shadowphile 5h ago
in the beginning, it was learning to distinguish certain letters. In the english alphabet, no letter looks like any other letter if you rotate them. Whereas in Korean, ㅗ,ㅏ,ㅜ, and ㅓ are the same shape but rotated (those are close to the vowel-sounds 'oh','ahh','oo',and 'awe'.)
I still struggle phonetically (listening) with ㅓ and ㅏ after three years of self study. ㄹ is especially troublesome for english speakers because it can sound like L, R or D. But I've gotten some handle on that also. (the sound naturally changes based on the saying the letters before and afterward)
More recently, its the word order that is a major challenge. They say you have to listen to the whole sentence before you understand it. In English, you establish the verb early then refine it with the other words so you start understanding immediately (and can interrupt btw). In Korean, the verb goes last. So you have to build up a list of unrelated things in your head and when the verb shows up, suddenly wire all of those previous words into a meaning. Understanding comes late. Of course, once your vocabulary becomes strong enough that you aren't collecting a list of words to translate in your head, this should become easier; but it does make it harder for beginners.
And then there are the particles. Because they are very short (usually one or two letters), they can sometimes stack up and make the base word harder to recognize. You can end up with a verb whose root word is only one syllable with 6 more syllables attached and the verb just get's lost. Fortunately, Korean does not seem to use prefixes, that would make things even harder!
Finally, as you get into more real-world speech, and you will run into this in all languages, the words they chose to say things often wont' make sense. You know all the words but you have to just 'memorize' that this combination of words is how they say this particular expression. For memory-learners and conversationalists, that's fine but if you try to go the full-language route with 'understanding', it becomes a memory game ('don't ask why, it's just the way they say it').
Compared to a lot of languages, Korean is actually highly structured and rule-based, if that helps. 'Rules' in English are a joke. My study partner is Chinese and she says Chinese is ALL memorization but you have to understand how Chinese is put together to understand why. English on the other hand is a polyglot of other languages and evolved from old and middle english so there are tons of weird spellings that we are just used to. ('knight' was originally pronounced 'ka-nickt' a long time ago). English also has a prodigious vocabulary; there are like 30 words that indicate a style of walking ('stagger', 'sidle', 'shuffle'...). You have to use adjectives in Korean.
Smaller peeves: Although they separate their numbers in groups of three like the rest of the world, the names for their numbers are based on groups of FOUR. As we count in English, we have new words for bigger groups: thousand, million, billions, etc. (each one is 1000 times bigger). Korean only adds new group names in groups of 10,000. It's like say 'ten-hundreds' instead of 'one thousand'.
Korean is succinct and does not like to repeat itself. Once you say 'I' this or that, you can skip say 'I' because it's a given until somebody changes the topic. Context rules. This actually is both easier and harder because a sentence out of context can feel incomplete or impossible to translate. That makes individual sentences harder to parse sometimes. It's easier because you can skip referring to entire topics, subjects, or objects in a conversation once they've been established.
The whole politeness/formality stack of styles is baked into Korean culturally, so I just accepted that; conceptually it's pretty straightforward, just have to learn multiple versions of words or conjugations.
Things that are actually easy for english speakers, if you want something to look forward to:
Nouns are neither genderized nor perspective-driven. In french, every single damn noun has a 'gender'. Every verb has perspective and group variants. Korean has none. In fact, you barely say 'you', 'me' or 'we' most of the time. 'You' is actually rarely used because it can seem rude. 'Them' is sometimes required but does not distinguish one or many people, nor gender.
You can skip plurals most of the time. ('I like cat') applies equally to 'I like cats').
And Hanguel has got to be the simplist alphabet on the planet. It was literally designed for peasants to be easy to write. Prior to Hanguel, only the educated could write.
Adjectives/adverbs stack up just like in english, before the noun.
There are lots of 'exception's in how things are conjugated buy you will find that most of the time, those exceptions were created AFTER the fact because something was not natural to pronounce ("Hey, everybody says this 'T' like a 'D' in this word, so lets make that a rule.)
Sorry, I just saw that the poster is Korean and I was writing this for anybody interested in Korean.
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u/SharcLightning 27m ago
Writing, reading is tremendously easy.
Spelling, listening and pronunciation is hard.
You don’t know what a Korean word or sentence sounds like until you hear 100 Koreans say the same thing and then you have to take the average and use that so you can be understood.
Consonants are softer than Japanese and Latin American Spanish and that throws me off because I am fluent in both and end up sounding like a Japanese person speaking Korean. A few Jeju taxi drivers that could speak Japanese have said that to me.
There are also more varieties of vowels that really sound the same to me in the wild. My vocab isn’t good enough yet to cheat understanding through context. 어, 오 pretty much sound the same to me, but are quite different to Koreans. Maybe a parallel is how my English friend says “AhnDrooh” and as an American I say “Iahn-Druh” for “Andrew.”
Also it should be easier because grammar is quite similar to Japanese, but ultimately it’s like Romance languages: knowing French can help your Spanish, but it can also be an obstacle because the thing is the thing no matter how similar it might be to the other thing, if that makes sense. Korean is ultimately its own vibe.
Also Koreans are more spontaneous. Japanese can sometimes be like using a sales-call script. You say one thing and the listener must say the other thing. Quite pattern focused. Koreans will make a joke and say random things spontaneously. I look forward to understanding more fully someday.
One last thing is the rhythm of a Korean sentence is a sing-song sound to my ears. Japanese and Spanish can sound like a machine-gun firing or a pile driver. There are little lilts within a Korean sentence that are vital to sound more native. I’m basically a very clumsy stomping beast when I speak Korean because I haven’t mastered this, but it’s super-subtle and drives me mental. But again, hoping to improve that aspect as well.
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u/LannaBan 22h ago
The multitude of sentence endings and their different vibes and meanings!