I recently decided after a long break to pick up RtK again( got about half way through last time) and acutally learn Japanese. I don't have the "just got back from Japan" glittery love for the culture anymore, I just want to learn it because of drive and interest now, so I think I'll be able to do it.

I was wondering however, once I master Japanese or at least get pretty good, would it be easy to learn Korean as well?

I want to be able to speak Japanese and Korean as they are the two most interesting asian countries to me. I feel like mastering these two will give me access to the most amount of interesting culture.

So what are your thoughts on learning Korean after Japanese?

Learning more languages will take time, even after you master Japanese. But knowing how you mastered one language will allow you to master the other in a shorter amount of time, since you know what it takes to get really good.

K well I'm not in a hurry. I want to master Japanese and Korean in 10 years... I think I can do it!

zachandhobbes Wrote:K well I'm not in a hurry. I want to master Japanese and Korean in 10 years... I think I can do it!

switch Korean with mandarin (for me). I estimate 8 years...(for me)

I had a bad experience learning Korean. I just couldn't get into Hangul. I ended up switching over to Japanese and Chinese after only a few months. What can I say...I like kanji.

I'm the other way around... I hate the Kanji QQ.

I have no experience with Hangul though. We'll see how that goes.

Womacks23 Wrote:I had a bad experience learning Korean. I just couldn't get into Hangul. I ended up switching over to Japanese and Chinese after only a few months. What can I say...I like kanji.

Kanji rules!

After mastering Japanese, buy a book to learn Korean.
But make sure the book is in Japanese....

Korean is a cake-walk if you know Japanese. The grammar is essentially the same, as are many of the words.

Hangul should take you about 3 hours to fully learn, and about 2 days of seeing it to master. It is that easy.

Well, Korean seems to be the easiest foreign language for Japanese to learn, so it shouldn't be that hard.

I'm doing this. After 4 years of Japanese (around JLPT 2 level - could have been higher I know!) I moved to Korea. Been studying Korean hardcore for about a year now and knowing Japanese definitely helps, but doesn't make it easy by a long way.

I think the biggest thing is that your brain is already wired to naturally accept the different sentence patterns and words that have different functions to English (particles, for example) and so you won't have to relearn the concepts again. You'll notice a lot of similarities with grammar when you start learning as the basic patterns are very very similar. The more you learn, the less this remains true though I've found...

For me the biggest challenge has been training my ear - I listen to Korean a lot but I'm not able to pick apart words and phrases as easily as I could in Japanese after a similar amount of time, despite my reading and writing being at a much higher level.

Speaking wise, I've found Korean much harder - it's very easy to express your thoughts and use reported speech in Japanese which means you can dive into conversation pretty early on in your studies, but it's gramatically more complex to do these things in Korean.

On the other hand, reading and writing are a piece of cake. As a previous poster said, it's possible to learn hangul in a few hours and while there are a number of exceptions (which aren't tricky once you start reading) it's a very very easy system to learn, and very logical too.

The Sino-Japanese words you know will usually have a very similar Korean counterpart, but the majority of verbs and common words used in every day speech are totally different - you probably won't feel the benefit of this aspect until you start reading more advanced Korean.

In summary, it will be easier but not easy! Good luck.