Korean a mouthful for English speakers

Korean has long been thought of as a difficult language to learn, and now a U.S. website, the ThirdAge (www.thirdage.com), has ranked it the fourth most difficult language to learn, at least among English native speakers.

The website, which calls itself the biggest site for baby-boomer generation women, said that Korean has a “different sentence structure, syntax, and verb conjugations that makes learning Korean extremely difficult for those who come from a European background.” It noted that written Korean also uses many Chinese characters.

Arabic was ranked as the most difficult language for using fewer vowels, which can be extremely hard for those learning to read the language. It was followed by Chinese, whose meaning changes according to the change of the tone of a word, and Japanese for having three different writing systems and two syllabary systems. Hungarian placed fifth for having feminine, masculine and neuter genders as well as seven different verb conjugations.

The site said that whether these languages are similar in grammar and structure to many people’s native tongue ― in this case, English ― was the main factor for the selection.

Susan Freese, who has been learning the Korean language for five years here, agrees. “Learning a dissimilar language is always a challenge but familiarity does matter: Learning Spanish with similar words and meanings to English is nothing like learning Korean, which you have to start from scratch,” she said.

Freese said the most delicate thing in the Korean language was the different vocabulary, endings and auxiliary particles according to age and status of the person being spoken to. “For younger people, peers and seniors, words must be used differently. Pronunciation using sounds that do not exist in English was also an obstacle,” she said.

Freese, who has also learned Japanese before her encounter with Korean, said Korean’s grammar and sentence order was relatively easy because Korean and Japanese have similar structure.

“But I think the Korean alphabet is one of the easiest written languages to learn and read: It’s very scientific and orderly. It’s a nicer part,” she said.

By Bae Ji-sook (baejisook@heraldcorp.com)