Korean vs Chinese: Which one's the easiest to learn? In conclusion, the Mandarin Chinese writing system is far more complex than its Korean counterpart. Hangul is far easier to learn than Hanzi. But, while Chinese grammar is rather predictable and stable, Korean grammar has some extra layers of difficulty.
Meanwhile, Korean grammar is likely the hardest, while tones in Mandarin are notoriously difficult for native English speakers to hear, and Japanese is the fastest spoken language in the world at over 7 syllables per second.
Despite easy characters to read, Korean is one of the most difficult languages to study. The Korean language is hard due to its contextual nature, where one sentence can be said in three different ways. The verbs and syntax can also be conjugated in hundreds of ways, depending on intensity, age, seniority, and mood.
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?
Korean and Japanese are at the top of the “most difficult” level – with Japanese having just a small edge on Korean for it's use of 2 alphabetic structures and use of kanji – Chinese characters (in total 3 alphabets essentially) instead of just one alphabet like in Korean.
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.
The logical order would be to start with Chinese, focus on learning the Hanzi, learn the vocabulary, and then start Korean and/or Japanese with a head start. Characters are a great mnemonic help to learn new vocabulary. Personally I started Korean before Chinese and I had a lot of difficulty remembering the vocabulary.
1. Mandarin Chinese. Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons.
A recent French study of the density and speed of 20 languages found Mandarin to be one of the slowest languages examined (in a group including French, English, and Japanese), in terms of syllables spoken per minute.
The Chinese language has a unique structure and pronunciation system that is vastly different from English. Chinese is made up of tens of thousands of characters, each with its own meaning, and often multiple pronunciations. This makes the language extremely difficult to learn, especially for non-native speakers.
The Korean language is full of short, or monosyllable words and their differences are often minutes. There is a fact. Many Korean words are homonyms, which does not help the learner's case either. A major stumbling block everyone faces while learning Korean is that many words sound identical.
3: DOES KOREAN SHARE SIMILARITIES WITH OTHER LANGUAGES? The Korean language belongs to the Altaic language family. It is related to Turkish, Mongolian, and Manchu (a Chinese dialect). In terms of grammar, Korean is closest to Japanese.
The Korean grammar system is very different from English, and the use of honorifics can get very confusing. Overall, it will come down to the time a beginner dedicates to their learning. With the correct dedication, Thai will be the easier language to master in a shorter amount of time.
Indonesian or Malay is the easiest Asian language to learn. Moreover, with 77 million speakers, it's certainly worth considering learning as the easiest Asian Language! Thus, what makes the language so simple compared to other Asian Languages?
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)
According to FSI, the Foreign Service Institute, Vietnamese is categorized as Category IV of languages. The difficulty is just below learning Arabic, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese. It normally takes 44 weeks or 1100 class hours to reach fluency.
According to several studies conducted over the course of the last decade, of all the lingos tested, the fastest was Japanese. Learn about it and other fast languages in our article.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Japanese is the fastest recorded language. It has a rate of 7.84 syllables per second.
Mandarin
As mentioned before, Mandarin is unanimously considered the most difficult language to master in the world! Spoken by over a billion people in the world, the language can be extremely difficult for people whose native languages use the Latin writing system.
According to a UNESCO survey, Bengali has been classified as the sweetest language in the world. As a language, Bengali is widely spoken all over India, including Assam and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The sweetest language in the world is also recognized in the Constitution of India.
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. But if you want a more accurate estimate of how long it will take you to learn Korean, you need to go deeper than the FSI estimate.
It takes about 4-7 years (roughly 2200 to 4000 hours) to become fluent in every aspect of the language, if you spend at least an hour and a half to study every day. However, it's quite common for learners to become more fluent in some areas than others depending on how they allotted their study time.
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.