Hello,

I have a quick question for those of you who have experience with the Korean language. I am thinking about spending a year in Korea but, well, I don't know any Korean. That's a problem : ) I know that Korean grammar and Japanese grammar are extremely similar, if not identical. Most Koreans living in Japan pick up Japanese really quickly as well. Speaking and Listening at least, not so much reading/writing Kanji.

Given that my Japanese is somewhere between N2 and N1, how long would it take to speak Korean on a decent conversational level? Does anyone have experience with this?

Thanks a lot!

Really interested to hear some thoughts on this topic, as well. I was studying both at the same time, and felt like I wasn't making good progress in either. I've been doing only Japanese, and planning to follow up with Korean once I'm at a good level of fluency.

I feel like Korean is opposite of japanese in conversation as far as it how long it takes to get conversing.　
Like you can learn to read/write korean in like let's say 3 hours or something like that. yes there's exceptions to the readings but it's really nothing compared English in all retrospect.

While in Japanese it'll take much longer even with RTK and the readings just get to be a pain in the ass after a while with the onten and rakuden? whatever that is called.

So I think for conversation it takes much longer for korean compared to Japanese. I don't know about it being as long as it would take become literate/able to write in Japanese but longer than japanese.

I don't know if it's my biased thinking but I feel like the daily conversation vocab for japanese is really small in comparison to english of course and I also think it's smaller than daily conversation for korean. But then when I asked about this in chiebukuro 1 person answered but he/she said that korean has more expressions not more vocabulary. I don't know how far you are in Japanese but after a while you notice people just say the same things over and over or say it in a similar way but in korean they have a lot more ways of expressing. It's like Japanese grammar times 10 at least with all the variations.
here's the chiebukuro thing the person said:
質問者が感じたのは、語彙じゃなく、表現の方じゃないかなと
思われますね。

私的には、語彙なら日本語の方が多いだとおもうんです。
しかし、表現なら、個性的な表現もないし、相手が何を言おうと
するのか、最初の言葉で分かってしまいます。。

I personally think the verb conjugation stuff is more complicated for korean compared to japanese... Technically korean verb conjugation is technically suppose to be easier to remember because of the whole vowel/consonent thing that it takes into consideration with the conjugation just because it has so many sounds.

I feel like japanese is more vague than korean. Like for Japanese you'll have verbs that have a many many meanings.... well even if you take into the consideration that they have different associated the verb is still the same sound ex. kakeru.

めがねをかける　안경을 쓰다
鍋を火にかける　냄비를 불에 올려놓다
常識にかける　상직이 부족하다
お金と時間をかける　돈도 시간을 들이다
誰が勝つかかける　누가 이길지 내기를 하다
看板をかける　간판을 걸다
迷惑をかける　폐를 끼치다
馬に乗って野原をかける　말을 몰고 들판을 달리다
月が欠ける　달이 이지러지다
前歯がかけている　앞니가 빠져 있다
窓にカーテンをかける　창문에 커튼을 치다
言葉をかける　말을 건네다
肩に手をかける　어깨에 손을 얹다
鍵をかける　자물쇠를 잠그다

so basically in japanese you use the same verb while in korean you have a diff verb each thing. And obviously it's not limited to kakeru, this is just one example.
there's more here:
http://hiroharuh.exblog.jp/i10/

One thing that is for sure if korean has a lot more bad words than Japanese. I think they use less english than Japanese

I'm personally learning korean after I learned Japanese so I can take advantage of the kango (kanji words) right now but I'm not focused on speaking whatsoever right now (just trying expand my passive vocab) + I like japanese shit too much so I'm not getting as much immersion as i'd like so I can't tell you maybe someone else can who's doing it more hardcore than I am.

Oh and I don't know if you follow AJATT but if you do you still have to put in your listenings hours for korean cause it's korean and your japanese listening hours don't count.

Go check out of the korean resources thread if you're gonna study korean.

and link to another chiebukuro about korean/vs japnaese
http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/...1253172807

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:after a while you notice people just say the same things over and over or say it in a similar way but in korean they have a lot more ways of expressing

I agree! While it'll take a long time to be able to read a newspaper or fully understand the news in Japanese, every day conversation is possible after a relatively short period of time. People tend to repeat the same phrases a lot, making it possible to pick up and use common phrases quite quickly. Also, you don't need to learn that much grammar to be able to converse.

Korean is a completely different kettle of fish. Japanese has a lot of verb conjugations too, but in reality you don't hear a lot of them very often in conversation. Koreans, on the other hand, freely use far more verb endings in every day conversation, making the language (in my opinion) slightly more nuanced and more difficult to follow as a learner.

Also, as howtwosavealif3 mentioned above, the same verb can have many uses in Japanese whereas you'd usually use a more specific verb in Korean. This does work the other way around too, as in the examples below, but not as often.

(쓰다)
안경을 쓰다 > Wear glasses
편지를 쓰다 > Write a letter
커피가 쓰다 > Bitter coffee
돈을 쓰다 > Spend money
컴퓨터를 쓰다 > Use a computer

I felt comfortable speaking in Japanese after about 6 months in the country. I've been in Korea for 18 months now and still struggle quite a bit. To be fair my lifestyle was different as I was a student in Japan and now work in Korea, but I'd say I spend just as much time studying and trying to speak as I did in Japan.

On the plus side, reading and writing Korean is a breeze!!!

To answer the original question - knowing Japanese will help when you start learning Korean as you'll be more familiar with the basic grammar (particles etc.) and sentence order, and you'll also learn kanji-derived vocabulary faster than someone approaching the language from scratch. It'll still be a hard slog though! Several people I've known here in Korea have a decent level of Japanese and had the same experience as me. I've not met anyone who has done so, but I imagine going the other way (Korean > Japanese) would be easier.

Thank you for your helpful post. It has been a while since I started this thread is still very relevant for me :)

It's a bit off-topic but since you've lived in both Japan and Korea I hope it's okay to ask you a couple of questions about it. To be honest, I'm a bit scared to go to Korea. I have lots of Korean friends in Japan and the US, but they are more or less Americanized or very "Japanese", so definitely different from the typical Korean. I enjoyed my life in Japan a lot, I don't really have any bad things to say about it, except that that people are a bit too busy with work and that Japan offers very limited career opportunities (for me). I would imagine these two things are similar in Korea.

However, I've heard lots of bad things from foreign people who are living in Korea. From not being able to make close Korean friends, lots of prejudices against foreigners, not being able to date Korean girls, etc. I never had problems with any of these in Japan, but from what I know about Korean culture these things may be certainly become problems in Korea. Would you mind elaborating on your experiences in Korea? Are you generally satisfied living there? What are the things that frustrate you in Korea?

First of all, you never mentioned how long it took you to get to N2-N1 in Japanese. And is that your conversational level as well?

In general, I'd estimate that it would take a Japanese person as much time to learn Korean as it would for an English speaker to learn French. By no means is the transition automatic. How long would it take you to learn French?

You could estimate that for an English speaker to learn Japanese, it will take 3 times longer than it would to reach the same level in French -- seeing as you have some Japanese and it might help you with Korean, one could venture that you might be able to learn Korean in half the time it took you to learn Japanese, or perhaps a bit longer.

that sounds like a fair assessment. Though I wonder if Japanese really takes three times as long? maybe just twice? I don't know, I've never seriously tried to learn another european language.

I've dabbled in Korean, and practiced reading signs a lot when I went there. And I like reading korean on bi/trilingual signage in Japan. There is definitely a lot of shared chinese vocabulary that is easy to figure out.

The biggest barrier to me, is the the writing system. Very easy to learn, easy enough to get a basic understanding of the pronunciation, but reading it quickly requires a lot of getting used to. Korean would be a breeze I think if it were just written in romaji.

My assumption that it would be relatively easy to learn Korean when knowing Japanese comes from the fact that Korean people in Japan speak Japanese extremely well, compared to other foreigners at least.

Even Koreans who have been in Japan for only 1-2 years usually have achieved very good conversational fluency in Japanese (they usually can't read Kanji well though). That's in stark contrast to most non-Korean foreigners who are still stuck on a basic Japanese level after 5+ years in Japan. And that seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

Granted, it's true that most Koreans I have met did take Japanese language classes when first coming to Japan, but I still think that language similarity must be a bigger factor.

ThomasB Wrote:people are a bit too busy with work and that Japan offers very limited career opportunities (for me). I would imagine these two things are similar in Korea.

Yep! I don't know what field you work in, but the proportion of expats doing work outside of the ESL/EFL field (engineers etc.) is much smaller in Korea compared to Japan. And, as you correctly assumed, most people are very busy with work.

ThomasB Wrote:Would you mind elaborating on your experiences in Korea? Are you generally satisfied living there? What are the things that frustrate you in Korea?

Certainly. It should be noted that Korea has only really in recent years received a large influx of (Western) foreigners, and as such ideas about multiculturalism still lag far behind even Japan. Having said that, my experience here has been mainly positive and I've not had problems making Korean friends or dating Korean girls.

The things that frustrated me when I first came to Korea were people's mannerisms in public spaces; the politeness towards strangers which people find so endearing about Japan is almost non-existent in Korea. People not waiting in line, unnecessary pushing and shoving and a general "me first" attitude annoyed me to begin with, but I've gotten used to it now and have learned to give as good as I get. The other thing I still hate is people spitting in public, but thankfully this seems to be dying out as you hardly see younger people doing it.

The other big thing that I prefer about Japan is that it's much more aesthetically pleasing. The majority of Korean city-dwellers live in high rise apartments, 95% of which are bone ugly monstrosities (like this http://expacked.files.wordpress.com/2009...tments.jpg). They really do blight the landscape and make most Korean cities look very samey. There are some beautiful palaces and temples in Korea, but Japan wins hands-down on this front, too.

So far it's been pretty negative but there are a lot of things I love about Korea, and I am definitely satisfied with my life here. From a financial point of view I feel secure as my accommodation is provided for free and it's still possible to save around half of my wages, living comfortably. Food is fantastic and cheap (Korean BBQ is the love of my life), and vast alcohol consumption is encouraged - the "all you can drink" alcohol plans prevalent in Japan don't exist in Korea for a reason! Also, it's very easy and convenient to get around Korea as it's public transport system is fantastic and SO cheap. Korea's equivalent of the Shinkansen (KTX) costs around W50,000 (~Y3500) to travel from one end of the country to the other, and there are also much cheaper bus and train options. In general travel within Korea is much, much less of a financial burden than travel within Japan.

Contrary to what you've heard, I've found the majority of Korean people easier to get to know and less stand-offish than most Japanese people I met. I'm aware this is a huge generalisation and of course doesn't apply to everybody, but it's been my feeling since I got here. The polite public face isn't as strong compared to Japan and so usually if someone is being kind to you, it's genuine.

I rambled on a lot, sorry. Basically, if you're thinking of coming for a year, I'd say do it! I'm sure you'll have a great time.

thatkidpercy Wrote:The things that frustrated me when I first came to Korea were people's mannerisms in public spaces; the politeness towards strangers which people find so endearing about Japan is almost non-existent in Korea. People not waiting in line, unnecessary pushing and shoving and a general "me first" attitude annoyed me to begin with, but I've gotten used to it now and have learned to give as good as I get.

I find this to be a kind of gilded cage sort of thing. It's great at first, but it quickly becomes tiring. It's one of the things that frustrates me the most about living in Japan right now. That "politeness", "avoiding confrontation," and "being nice" can be very cutting in practice. I've worked very hard to understand Japanese. I don't find it polite when people keep not giving me pieces of paper with information on them(lol foreigners can't read Japanese!) or recommending things that "have very few kanji."

So it doesn't sound strange to me at all that there being less of that "politeness" in Korea is something you would enjoy.

Thank you for the interesting post, it definitely helped me a lot! And it's very interesting to hear from someone who has lived in both places.

erlog Wrote:I've worked very hard to understand Japanese. I don't find it polite when people keep not giving me pieces of paper with information on them(lol foreigners can't read Japanese!) or recommending things that "have very few kanji."

I felt the same way, but then I always think that you also have to look at it from the side of the Japanese. You, who can read Kanji and speak decent Japanese, is the exception under (western) foreigners. From my own experience it's a fact that most foreigners can barely speak Japanese, and if they can, it's likely that they cannot read Kanji. Honestly, during my time in Japan I have not met a single foreigner who can speak AND read decently. How is the other person supposed to know? If I was in their shoes I would probably do the same and risk to offend 2% of people who come to me, rather than making life hard for the other 98%. I don't look at it as a result of Japanese culture, rather a result of previous experiences with other foreigners. So, it's our own fault. The problem may not exist in Korea because well, Korean is easy to read

Still, you're right, and no matter what the reason for it might be., it's something that bothers me and that won't change anytime soon..

Yeah, I'm aware of those things. Those things are the reason that I haven't yelled at anyone about it or blown up at anyone yet. That doesn't stop it from being annoying.

しかたないだね。

Omg I just remembered this hilarious video.

I don't know if it's funnier if you know korean and Japanese but I do know korean and Japanese... just so you know the parts where the lady says stuff that's the "same" that's not really korean... but it's totally korean pronunciation

he's sorta famous in korea too since he went on korean tv.

I am afraid I have not really read the other comments, but I believe it is quite easy.

A lot of grammar is very similar or even identical. Also the way you can lexically express things. Conversation is also pretty similar.

The only thing that seems strange is that the way you "conjugate" verbs is somewhat strange, but you get used to that. All the irregular structures follow a pattern that can be learned...

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:Omg I just remembered this hilarious video.

I don't know if it's funnier if you know korean and Japanese but I do know korean and Japanese... just so you know the parts where the lady says stuff that's the "same" that's not really korean... but it's totally korean pronunciation

he's sorta famous in korea too since he went on korean tv.

I know enough Korean to realize that was hilarious. She threw me off the first time she said Japanese with Korean pronunciation.

Having only scanned the other comments - and therefor having seen that others here know more Korean than I do......

My Japanese (except kanji, hence my using this site) is strong.
However, I feel that anyone with a sound grasp of what you'd learn here in a Japanese school in, say, your first 6 to 9 months, would be of great help to you in learning basic Korean. Certainly that was true for me.
I, too, would say that "as a beginner and at beginner level" you could reasonably assume Korean sentence patterns to be so similar to Japanese, as to be "the same" for practical beginner learning purposes. Verb conjugations are different, yes, but not terribly so.
As for the comments kindly made by those (who know more than me) about (for example) Korean verbs being used in fewer / narrower contexts, I can not respond, but surely as with any (3rd?) language that is very similar to your (2nd?) language, just building your ability based on similarities to begin with is a nice "boost"?

Good luck.

AlexandreC Wrote:You could estimate that for an English speaker to learn Japanese, it will take 3 times longer than it would to reach the same level in French -- seeing as you have some Japanese and it might help you with Korean, one could venture that you might be able to learn Korean in half the time it took you to learn Japanese, or perhaps a bit longer.

Not a bad estimate for French, although perhaps a bit much -- the FSI at the Department of State estimates 600 hours of class time for French and 2200 for Japanese.

I asked two people (one Canadian native English speaker, one native speaker of German) who studied Korean after Japanese. Both guessed that it would take about a third of the time to become proficient in Korean, and unlike most comments so far, they said it also depended on how broad your sino-japanese vocabulary is (i.e. do you guess Chinese-derived words right if you hear them in Korean?). That said both also complained that Korean pronunciation was incredibly difficult.

I found interesting posts in this other forum that relates to this.
It was from this thread
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...128&TPN=14

and i quoted some of them on my tumblr
one of the ones i really find interesting is this one
http://tsukinofune.tumblr.com/post/29335...enjoyed-it

Shinichirou Wrote:I am afraid I have not really read the other comments, but I believe it is quite easy.

A lot of grammar is very similar or even identical. Also the way you can lexically express things. Conversation is also pretty similar.

The only thing that seems strange is that the way you "conjugate" verbs is somewhat strange, but you get used to that. All the irregular structures follow a pattern that can be learned...

while what you say is true korean grammar is much more convoluted than japanese grammar. and thus it's more difficult as far as grammar is concerned.

nadiatims Wrote:that sounds like a fair assessment. Though I wonder if Japanese really takes three times as long? maybe just twice? I don't know, I've never seriously tried to learn another european language.

I've dabbled in Korean, and practiced reading signs a lot when I went there. And I like reading korean on bi/trilingual signage in Japan. There is definitely a lot of shared chinese vocabulary that is easy to figure out.

The biggest barrier to me, is the the writing system. Very easy to learn, easy enough to get a basic understanding of the pronunciation, but reading it quickly requires a lot of getting used to. Korean would be a breeze I think if it were just written in romaji.

Ummm u need to read more hanguel. You don't seem to understand the brilliance of hanguel with respect to the korean laguage

http://www.talktomeinkorean.com/blog/hap...-day-2013/
You'd really prefer to read romaji mumbo jumbo for a language with a lot of vowels. Hangeul is more easily read than romaji period

nadiatims Wrote:The biggest barrier to me, is the the writing system. Very easy to learn, easy enough to get a basic understanding of the pronunciation, but reading it quickly requires a lot of getting used to. Korean would be a breeze I think if it were just written in romaji.

Except the way they choose to romanize Korean is 10 times worse than romaji. It gave me such a headache I decided to just skip learning it and dove straight into hangul.

Hangul is so easy to read/write/etc, not to mention beautiful and fun to read. I recommend doing a lot of reading and listening similar to what Steve Kaufman does, that's how I got used to reading and pronunciation. The only tough part is getting used to typing it, but if you are a good touch typist it shouldn't take more than a week or so. There are a few free online typing sites that let you switch the language to Korean that you can practice at.

One perspective from the other side of the mirror.

In a language school I studied at, the Koreans become fluent in Japanese at an extremely accelerated rate. Across the board: speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

I won't discount the amount of time and effort the Koreans students put into studying but there must be some other factors behind this accelerated learning.

Some Korean friends studying Japanese mentioned that Korean and Japanese grammar through intermediate levels have a lot in common. Also many shared words and sounds. Koreans study kanji for several years in school although my friends claim that is less common in recent years.

On reflection, perhaps Japanese will be an advantage to you when learning Korean.

.

ThomasB Wrote:My assumption that it would be relatively easy to learn Korean when knowing Japanese comes from the fact that Korean people in Japan speak Japanese extremely well, compared to other foreigners at least.

Even Koreans who have been in Japan for only 1-2 years usually have achieved very good conversational fluency in Japanese (they usually can't read Kanji well though). That's in stark contrast to most non-Korean foreigners who are still stuck on a basic Japanese level after 5+ years in Japan. And that seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

Granted, it's true that most Koreans I have met did take Japanese language classes when first coming to Japan, but I still think that language similarity must be a bigger factor.

Anyone who lives in Japan and uses Japanese everyday ought to be at least conversationally fluent after 5 years if they're making any effort...

I'm really not buying the "People from <Asian country> learn Japanese dramatically faster in the long term" story. Most differences can be explained due to personal expectations (the level they settle for) and proactivity towards study and practice. Most westerners or Chinese people here (for example) tend to be surrounded by other western or Chinese people and/or work/study in environments where fluency in Japanese isn't demanded, which aren't good conditions for improving.

I'm currently in the process of making the transition in the opposite direction (from Korean to Japanese). I find that knowing Korean helps a lot with syntax and sentence structure (I barely have to think at all about where things go and what particles to use), and also with some vocabulary since there are many words that sound similar. The logic behind the language and the use of various connectors also seems similar. All in all, knowing Korean has made things much, much easier.

With that said, the Japanese writing system is a challenge compared to Korean; it's just taking so much longer to get that foundation needed to access the rest of the language with Japanese, whereas with Korean it was quite easy, especially since I never took up learning hanja. As others have mentioned, however, Japanese does seem easier to speak than Korean, which contains more sounds and shorter words that can be difficult to differentiate, making pronunciation and listening comprehension hard to master. I'm not far enough along in Japanese to say whether Korean speakers use a wider variety of expressions, or perhaps speak faster, but I wouldn't discount those possibilities as well.

In regard to the questions/comments about discrimination, etc., in Korea, I have to agree with ThomasB's acquaintances that prejudice is a problem. Quite a few people seem to resent the presence of foreigners and look down on them--although many are also very welcoming. I know more than a few foreigners in Korea who've been harassed or assaulted just for being foreign, or walking down the street with a Korean partner. It doesn't happen all the time or anything, but it does happen and is something to be aware of.

(By the way, although I think already knowing a language like Korean is a huge advantage for someone learning Japanese, I can't discount what dizmox is saying about expectations and being in an environment where language fluency is expected. That's an opportunity and a motivating force that can play a huge role for someone in learning a language.)

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:Omg I just remembered this hilarious video.

Do you know this guy's name and what show this is? Because he's usually hilarious and I have no idea who he is.

Edit: Nevermind, it's 陣内 智則