skylarth
Member
From: USA
Registered: 2007-08-08
Posts: 49
So, I have been really enjoying my Japanese studies, but I am thinking of trying to learn Korean alongside. I take Japanese classes in college, but I have a good deal of Korean international friends, and a friend who wants to learn it with me. Does anyone have any advice about this, namely:
1) How to keep the two seperate. I am planning to use pimsuler and then go from there, probabbly some form of an attempt at partial immersion, and using a textbook + native speaker friends. Should I study Japanese at a different part of the day? Should I try to layer the Korean, and learn it from Japanese? I see two problems with this, firstly I dont know if my Japanese is good enough to do that yet (although it would probably be a good way to learn more Japanese), and also, that none of my friends that I would be studying with know Japanese. That said,
2) Does anyone know a really good book about learning Korean that would be appropriate for someone who has finished pimsuler? English or Japanese. Especially Japanese would be interesting as the grammar is supposed to be somewhat similar, and it would be cool to have as a reference, if not right away.
3) Any general advice on Korean?
Megaqwerty
Member
Registered: 2007-04-05
Posts: 318
Wanderlust generally isn't all that great: you should probably gain a good deal of proficiency in a language before moving on.
Additionally, there is a synergistic benefit for Korean from learning Japanese, and vice versa (primarily in Chinese readings, I believe: I'm actually interested in this myself, as I plan on going into Korean later, much later). Ergo, you should probably focus on Japanese and then later focus on Korean. Remember: divide and conquer.
kanjapan
Member
From: Tokyo
Registered: 2007-08-25
Posts: 24
I studied Korean for one year in my 5th year of Japanese study. Personally I think it is good to have at least the basics of the Japanese language down and then proceed to learning Korean. Since the languages are so much the same at the core you would easily mix up the two if your knowledge of both languages is elementary.
To me Korean was not like another language but like a different kind of Japanese. A Japanese puzzle if you like. The word order is the same and Korean uses equivalents of important Japanese particles like が, はand を. Korean also uses kanji but often a version of the kanji that is older and more complex than the ones used in mordern day Japan. The thing with Korean is that kanji are often not written as characters and are written with the Korean hangul alphabet instead. If you convert all "hangulized" kanji of a Korean sentence into the original characters a person with a fair amount of knowledge of Japanese would be able to understand a whole lot of Korean without much effort.
Learning Korean definitely expands your horizon and is a whole lot of fun and easy to do if you know Japanese. The Hangul system is so easy you can literally learn it within an hour. After that you could start out by learning the Korean equivalents of the things you already know in Japanese, like the particles I already mentioned. I advise you to attain a level of proficiency in Japanese that would allow you to learn Korean with Korean language books intended for Japanese readers. That way you do not have to bridge the rather large gap between English and Korean.
For some time now there is a real Korean wave (韓流, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_wave) going on in Japan, mainly because of some Korean drama series that became and still are enormously popular. Since then everything Korean including food culture, music, the language and of course movies and drama series have become really big here. Therefore if you know Japanese and you want to learn Korean, now is the time to start and do it! Korean drama series are broadcast on tv for free in two languages and there are tons of great books on learning Korean in Japanese.
