Learning Korean

I have a natural knack for languages and studying culture and languages is one of the great joys of my life. So when I realised I was coming to Korea and had the opportunity to learn an Asian language that very few Westerners can read or speak, I was obviously thrilled.

Of course, most foreigners do not necessarily share my joy of the strange and exotic and the idea of learning lists of inexpressible words and grammar systems that simply doesn't make since (from an English-speaking person's perspective), is not anyone's cup of tea.

So yes, Korean is different from English, VERY different. In almost every way. It's also not necessarily an easy language to learn. Easy is a relative term here since it will be much easier for a Japanese or Chinese person to learn Korean, than for most people. But most of us, reading this, are probably monolingual and we've just been using English since the glorious day we stepped from the womb. For THOSE people, Korean will not necessarily be an easy language to acquire, or obtain any sort of fluency in.

The United States Defence Language Institute places Korean in the same category as Chinese, Japanese and Arabic (the other three most difficult languages to master for English speakers) and states than it takes about 63 weeks to reach a level where a student has "sufficient capability to meet routine social demands and limited job requirements and can deal with concrete topics in past, present, and future tense." This of course refers to 63 weeks of full time study. Compare this to the acquisition of French or Italian which takes only 25 weeks to reach the same level and you can see that Korean takes twice as long.

However, Korean remains a very scientific language with few irregularities and fairly easy pronunciation once you've mastered the alphabet. Unlike Chinese, Korean doesn't use tonality to reflect meaning except for a rising tone to indicate a question and a lowering tone to indicate a statement (as in English).

When I studied ancient Hebrew at University, I was frustrated by the constant presence of irregularities within rules and grammar point. Every rule would have a hundred irregularities and lists of irregular verbs (like English!) that you simply had to memorize. When learning Korean though, this is not the case, and in that sense, it's much more straightforward.

So now that I've completely dissuaded you to have anything to do with Korean (or have excited you since the challenge has just gotten bigger!) let's have a look at some of the interesting ways in which is different from English.

Word Order - In Korean, verbs are always at the end. Let's use an example: The Sentence "I eat a sandwich" has the verb (eat) smack in the middle. But in Korean, it would look like this: "I a sandwich eat". For those of you familiar with German, this won't be such a huge obstacle. And for the rest just think of the way Yoda spoke in Star Wars! "Be brave, you must!"

Pronouns - Apart from 'you' and 'I' (which is often simply left out), Korean to a large extent doesn't use pronouns. There's no 'he' or 'she' and Korean (and because of this, when Koreans speak English they'll often refer to a female as 'he' or vice versa). So when you're referring to someone in a sentence and can't use 'he' or 'she' or 'him' or 'her', how will people know who you're talking about? Well, often the context implies who you're talking about, or you can just use the person's name. There are also kinship titles people use, see the next point.

Kinship titles - Everyone's one big family in Korea, at least that's what the language will have you believe. You'll be excused for thinking you've entered la-la land when you hear a Korean walk of to an old man he/she's never met and call him 'harabojji' (Grandpa). A long lost family member perhaps? Nope. In step with a culture of solidarity and collectivism, Koreans use familial kinship titles even with strangers.

Formal titles - Koreans address each other according to their work title or rank in society. One of the reasons they usually exchange business cards upon meeting for the first time, is simply so that they know how to address each other.

This article has given you a brief overview of the Korean language, for a list of useful Korean phrases go here, for a more in-depth look at studying the language read this article.