Korean and Japanese might be the easiest languages for a native Chinese speaker to learn. While Korean and Japanese belong to a different language family from Chinese, centuries of cultural exchange have filled Korean and Japanese with Chinese vocabulary, in fact, 60% of Korean vocabulary has Chinese roots.
Knowing Chinese will help you learn Korean in a few different ways, giving you maybe a 25% advantage over other Korean learners: A lot of words in Korean will sound familiar (as they come from Chinese)
Arabic is a language most Mandarin speakers will find challenging. Its writing system is an abjad, which functions very differently from both Chinese characters and the English alphabet because it uses letters to represent consonants but not all vowels, and it uses a cursive script, so letters combine and change forms.
Relatively, Korean would be an easier language to learn. Thanks to its phonetic alphabet and more simplistic grammar rules, Korean is not the most challenging Asian language to learn. Chinese on the other hand is much more widely spoken. This means that finding study materials and practice partners would be easier.
Which language is easier for a native Mandarin speaker, Korean or Japanese? I think it would be easier for a native Mandarin speaker to learn Japanese: Korean has more consonant distinctions that don't exist in Mandarin than Japanese does. There aren't as many new sounds for a Mandarin speaker to learn in Japanese.
Language Recommendations for Chinese Speakers
Korean and Japanese might be the easiest languages for a native Chinese speaker to learn.
Generally speaking, we might assert that Korean is easier for an English speaker to learn than Mandarin Chinese. But this is very relative. In fact, the US Foreign Service Institute assigns Mandarin Chinese and Korean the same level of difficulty. Both languages are in “Category Four”.
The FSI puts Korean as a Category V language. Which means, it's one of the hardest languages to master. They estimate 2200 hours of study before you can reach fluency in Korean. Or 88 weeks of extremely intense study.
Diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) were formally established on July 1986. Before then, the PRC recognized only the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) while South Korea in turn recognized only the Republic of China (Taiwan).
Chinese and Japanese are two of the most popular languages to learn, Japanese is generally seen as being harder than Chinese due to its writing system and complex grammar structures.
Given its long history and the isolation of the region in which it is spoken, Wenzhounese is so unusual in its phonology that it has the reputation of being the least comprehensible dialect for an average Mandarin speaker.
Cantonese – Most Difficult Language Overall
Some people debate whether Cantonese deserves recognition as a language in its own right or a dialect of Chinese. Either way, Cantonese poses plenty of problems for students, even if they already speak Mandarin! But why is Cantonese harder than Mandarin for English speakers?
Riau Indonesian is different from most other languages in how simple it is. There are no endings of any substance, no tones, no articles, and no word order. There is only a little bit of indicating things in time.
No, they can't. Korean and Chinese can't understand each other. They have a distinctive language family, Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan (also known as Trans-Himalayan family) while Korean is a Koreanic language (consisting of the modern Korean language collectively with extinct primeval relatives).
Because the alphabet didn't naturally evolve but was explicitly created by King Sejong, it functions quite differently from many other languages. The ease and logic behind learning the basics of writing and reading make Korean a language worth learning.
The short answer is No. These languages are all mutually unintelligible. Even though many words and expressions have been borrowed over centuries of proximity and contact, it would be challenging to construct a Mandarin sentence that could be understood by a Korean speaker without proficiency in Mandarin.
South Korea (officially the Republic of Korea), independent since 1948, is not recognised by one UN member, North Korea. North Korea considers itself to be the sole legitimate government of Korea, and claims all territory controlled by South Korea.
Diplomatic relations between South Korea and the Republic of China (Taiwan) were terminated on 23 August 1992, followed by South Korean recognition of the People's Republic of China (PRC, Communist China) and formation of bilateral recognition between them.
They have a close special relationship and China is often considered to be North Korea's closest ally. China and North Korea have a mutual aid and co-operation treaty, signed in 1961, which is currently the only defense treaty either country has with any nation.
It takes about three months or 90 days to learn enough Korean to have at least 3-minute conversations in Korean if you study for 7 to 10 hours per week. Moreover, after one year of looking at this pace, you will become fluent and comfortable with Korean conversation.
How long does it take to learn Korean fluently? It will take about 1200 hours to reach a high intermediate level. You'll need additional practice, so you may want to double that number to 2400 hours to get towards fluency. That would be about 23 hours of study per week for two years.
Omo: This is short for "omona" and means "oh, my."
Unlike other East-Asian languages, Korean isn't a tonal language. This means, that the meaning of the word doesn't change, regardless of what your accent is like. This makes learning Korean much easier than Japanese.
Korean and Japanese are both similar and different from each other in certain aspects. Both languages share Chinese characters but have different pronunciations and vocabulary. It is easier for people to learn Korean if they already know Japanese and Chinese.
1. Chinese — 1.3 Billion Native Speakers. Numbers vary widely — Ethnologue puts the number of native speakers at 1.3 billion native speakers, roughly 900 million of whom speak Mandarin — but there's no doubt it's the most spoken language in the world.