a boost of confidence from Wikipedia

[Bouks]

A very interesting quote I found in the Wikipedia entry on Korean (language):

The United States' Defense Language Institute classifies Korean alongside Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese as a Category IV language, meaning that 63 weeks of instruction (as compared to just 25 weeks for French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian) are required to bring an English-speaking student to a limited working level of profiency in which he or she has "sufficient capability to meet routine social demands and limited job requirements" and "can deal with concrete topics in past, present, and future tense."[10]

63 weeks, and I've only had 13. So I have only reached "1/5th working proficiency". I think I'll cut myself some slack, and stop thinking, "Why am I learning so slowly?"

[usakorjb03]

hey I have a korean mother, how u think i feel lol i wonder why i'm learning so slow too sometimes.

[jaesun]

Only 13 weeks of studying Korean? Then you're doing well.
I think after 13 weeks I was just starting to move beyond hangul
People say hangul is easy to learn. And they're right. It's just that it takes a while to go from reading syllables to reading a whole word or phrase, and really learning anything.

I'm not surprised Korean is rated hard. I always thought English would be a difficult language to learn. But I was comparing it to German, French, Spanish... Which are relatively more logical (I think). Now I think Korean might be harder to learn than English!


My Mother spoke German, and I always felt my German was inadequate. In school we learned standard German (of course). I went to Germany and heard mitteldeutsch dialect, and for the first time I felt like German was comfortable- it was the dialect of my Mother and I felt at home.

[seolli]

Woah luckily i'm chinese and know chinese, so easier to learn korean.

But somehow, it seems like there are more words in korean that sound more like english than chinese when alot of people say that the most korean words which are borrowed off another language is Chinese...To me, Korean is easier than Chinese, in terms of words and reading it.But because Chinese has no grammer/sentence structure, so it's easier to form sentences and all.

[austinfd]

Woah luckily i'm chinese and know chinese, so easier to learn korean.

But somehow, it seems like there are more words in korean that sound more like english than chinese when alot of people say that the most korean words which are borrowed off another language is Chinese...To me, Korean is easier than Chinese, in terms of words and reading it.But because Chinese has no grammer/sentence structure, so it's easier to form sentences and all.

REALLY? I've always heard that the grammar is surprisingly similar to English. But I've never heard that from someone who is actually Chinese, so please set me straight!

[seolli]

REALLY? I've always heard that the grammar is surprisingly similar to English. But I've never heard that from someone who is actually Chinese, so please set me straight!

I'm chinese but because i'm from Singapore, I know both English and Chinese. So i hope you don't mind if i use simplified Chinese...
For example,
For the sentence 'Why can't I do it this way?' ,
you can phrase it as either
' 我为什么不能这样做？ ' which literally means “I-why-cannot-this way-do”. which means "why can't I do it this way"
or
' 为什么我不能这样做? ' which literally means " Why-i-cannot-this-way-do", which the meaning is also "Why can't I do it this way?".

I'm not really sure how to explain Chinese sentence structures and all that, but it's kind of like two different structures but the meaning is the same. So for us, it's like there's isn't any structure.

Hope i haven't confused you ^^

[shanshanchua]

I wouldn't say there's no sentence structure!! I'm sure there is, but just that because we study Chinese from young in Singapore, while we can speak and read it, we can't really say how it works, what the sentence structure is etc. Often, someone who studies it fresh later on in life will know these things better! (So for the same reason, not any native Korean speaker, ironically, can teach Korean well, although he himself has learnt it from young and is perfectly fluent in it.)

What I know is that Chinese is easy in the sense that it has no conjugations.

[the_haunted_boy]

Thats interesting, I always thought that different people learn different things at different rates.

I am not a norm! I AM AN INDIVIDUAL!!!!!!

Anyway, for me I would like to know enough Korean to at least read a novel, which might take more than 63 weeks.

[javiskefka]

I bet you could do it in 61 .

[holdfast]

i was able to watch korean tv without subtitles after one year (i guess that's 52 weeks).


my goal is to be able to read harry potter in korean after my second year. that's in february! i need to study hard if that is going to happen! if i can read it even with looking up a few words, i'll be happy. i still look up words in english quite often - most of the time just to see if the definition i've accepted from common usage is actually correct (i'm a little strange, i suppose).

[Bouks]

I'm reading Harry Potter in French! Don't measure your competence by how many words you look up. I lived in France for how long - 9 years maybe? I guess that counts as fluency. But I am looking up at least a few words on each page, because I'm encountering lots of words that just aren't used in everyday life. And because of the subject matter, you're bound to encounter some very obscure and rarely used words.

When I had translation class in college, I learned that we have three sets of vocabulary - speaking, writing and reading. The smallest set would be speaking. When you write, you use more words than you would speaking. Reading is the largest set - you see many words that you rarely or never use on your own.

[shanshanchua]

i was able to watch korean tv without subtitles after one year (i guess that's 52 weeks).

I'll be ecstatic if i can progress to that level in a year! Do share with us your study program/regime!