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.
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.
Korean, known in the language itself as Kugo, is the language of the Korean Peninsula in northeast Asia. In the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) there are 20 million speakers and in the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) there are 42 million speakers.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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. First and foremost, the writing system is extremely difficult for English speakers (and anyone else) accustomed to the Latin alphabet.
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.
Try to adjust your schedule as you go, and if things get difficult or you're too busy, focus on getting at least 15 to 20 minutes every day. If you're learning Korean full-time, aim for 4–7 hours a day.
While countries like Vietnam and Korean already had their own spoken languages, they did not yet have a writing system. Therefore, many of them adopted Chinese characters to express their language in written form.
Although the Korean and Chinese languages are not related in terms of grammatical structure, more than 50 percent of all Korean vocabulary is derived from Chinese loanwords, a reflection of the cultural dominance of China over 2 millennia.
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.
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.
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).
One of the most challenging areas of Korean grammatical structure is the concept of particles. Because there is no corresponding construct in English grammar. Thus, the idea of using particles appears even more perplexing to new learners. In Korean grammar, particles serve as sentence markers.
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.
It takes a learner with average aptitude only 15 weeks to reach level 2 for Spanish or French, but about 50 weeks to reach a similar level of the Chinese language. If you want to be fully fluent in Mandarin, you'd better plan to spend about 230 weeks, which is about 4 years.
No, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are not the same language. They are all part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, but they are not mutually intelligible. Japanese and Korean are more similar to each other than Chinese, but all three languages have significant differences in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.
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.
Thai is considered a difficult language for English speakers to learn because it has significant linguistic differences. For example, Thai is a tonal language and uses a different writing system.