If you compare both languages, you will notice that both of them are equally challenging. The Korean language's writing systems are hard to learn, whereas the Japanese alphabet is complex to understand. 40 Alphabets, which makes creating and understanding sentences easier. Easier as the writing system is more simple.
However, due to the sheer volume of English speakers who want to learn Mandarin or Japanese, there are more resources for those languages. From that practical standpoint, learners might find that the hardest language to learn of the three is Korean.
Which language is easier to learn– Korean or Japanese? Korean is considered to be much easier than Japanese. There are more letters in the Japanese alphabet than in Korean. Japanese also contains more complicated Chinese characters and difficult grammar.
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.
If you're the type of learner who likes to jump right in and start speaking the language, Korean might be a better choice since it has a more straightforward grammar structure. On the other hand, if you like to take things slowly and really understand the rules before using them, Japanese might be a better fit.
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.
However, since Korean is the easiest language to read due to its letter-based reading system, that also means Korean is the easiest language to write. You still need to know the grammar, though.
Anime is a form of Japanese animation whose origins go back before the 1920s. Later, before and during World War II, many organizations for artists and cartoonists were established.
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”.
Duolingo's Korean course covers a good amount of basic words, which is a good starting point. But this course fails to go beyond beginner level, so users shouldn't expect to achieve high level fluency by only using this app.
Both Japanese and Korean languages have similarities in terms of grammar, but there's a difficulty of studying in their Vocabulary building. This analysis proves that Korean and Japanese languages are not recommendable to learn at the same time.
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.
Similarities between Japanese and Korean
It's very obvious upon listening to people speak both of these languages that they sound different. Speakers of each respective language wouldn't be able to understand each other without some prior knowledge of the other language.
This being the case, it becomes clear how Korean is harder than Japanese when it comes to pronouncing distinct words correctly. And once again, things only get more complicated once consonants are added into the mix.
A recent survey of over 70,000 members of BeautifulPeople.com found that Korean men and women are considered more beautiful than their Japanese neighbors. Korean inhabitants were also highly ranked, among the world's most beautiful people globally.
However, considering the larger number of sounds and the different particles in Korean, Japanese is definitely the easier language to start in. If you're not good at distinguishing new sounds and pronunciations, you're definitely going to have a hard time with Korean.
Thai will get easier as learners progress. Most of the challenges will exist in the beginning - tone, unfamiliar sounds, and reading. However, once a learner begins to acquire these, the language gets easier. Korean, on the other hand, will become more difficult for learners.
1 Dragon Ball & Dragon Ball Z.
To distinguish it from its Japanese counterpart, Korean animation is often called hanguk aeni (Korean: 한국 애니; lit. Korean animation) or guksan aeni (Korean: 국산 애니; lit. domestic animation).
In Japanese, anime is written as “アニメ” (literally, “anime”) and is short for the word animation (アニメーション or animeeshon).
Korean and Japanese grammar and sentence construction are extremely similar. They both share a number of Chinese loanwords, but their original vocabulary and pronunciation are very different, rendering these two languages mutually incomprehensible.
Apart from its very different grammar style from other languages, it also uses extremely foreign vocabulary. Plus, there are honorifics and delicate nuances to its conjugation. As a result, this makes it more confusing. All this takes effort, a lot of time, and patience to grasp.
The truth is that Korean is one of the easiest Asian languages to learn for English speakers. Although Korean ranks as one of the most difficult languages by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), you'll feel incredible ease when it comes to learning Korean grammar compared to other “difficult” foreign languages.