I'm thinking of learning korean because I already know English and Spanish, and living here in korea town, I thought I might as well learn their language.
I have have a question, how hard is it? I heard it was hard but that doesnt say much. ANyone tried learning it before?
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Anonymous2009-10-22 11:37
>>40
I agree, but you sound very bitter. Failed polyglot?
I'm learning it right now, a friend is teaching me, and my American-English manner of speaking makes me terribly clumsy, I say ㅅ as ㅆ and it makes my ㅅㅐ (bird) sound more like ㅆㅐ (strong). The letters make a lot more sense than ones in other languages, but at this time I still find vowels really challenging. I'm learning to write it, though -- the next step is learning to properly type (and pronounce eventually). I try to avoid books with romanized only text -- it's not as easy to recall the pronunciations and appearances of characters otherwise.
I'm just using junk from byki.com atm (oh god please don't beat me up) but I also have the insight of a native speaker with me -- I would sound like an excessively polite and perhaps insincere foreigner otherwise. I don't expect to be perfect anytime soon, but I'm off to a better start than I was with Spanish, I think.
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Anonymous2009-10-23 21:26
>>43
I'm surprised you find 새 vs. 쌔 harder than for example 개 vs. 캐.
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Anonymous2009-10-24 0:22
>>44
I'm kind of slurry in speech. At the moment, my teacher usually tells me to say a "g" like sound for the first and a "k" like sound in the second instance. I still sound incredibly american for sure, though
I tried it, but it is hard. You will learn the 'alphabet' in a day but than you still need to learn everything else. And you will probably have trouble pronouncing the dubble consonants...
Korean is... 안 쉬워, and that is quite an understatement. Horrible honorific system, you will either talk ultra polite, or quite the opposite. It is a SOV language, 'subject object verb'...
So you need to pay attention to the end of the sentence. Aaaand there is no possible way you will learn how to talk with nk accent since every learning material is focused on sk... which is quite ignorant imo. Korean will never be as an important language as Chinese, or Japanese... I never tried Japanese but from what I understood it is a bit similar to Korean, but not phonetic. If you really want to learn something that is useful and 'easy' I would suggest French, since you already know Spanish.
Not OP, but does anybody have any good websites for learning Hangul?
I have the first 2 levels of the Ganada Korean Institute's course on the way to me, should be here soon hopefully, if customs doesn't keep hold of them for too long. I would just like to get the alphabet down though, before I start on the course itself.
I want to teach English abroad once I finish my degree and get my TEFL certificate, it seems S.Korea pays well and is pretty easy to get a job with no experience. Add to that, Europe's largest Korean community is a short bus ride away from me, it sounds like as good a place as any to start with.
What the hell are you speaking?
I'm native Korean, I think he used Google translator :-|
btw, I think It's hard to learn if you don't speak japanese...
as well as you know, It's similar with japanese, you gotta say like this "Korean learning how difficult is?" = "how difficult is it learning korean?"