Why is learning Korean so hard?

In the past two years, I have been studying the Korean language. I have a great private teacher, do my homework, and practice on the street every day. Still, I have difficulty understanding a Korean person speaking to me, let alone listening to the radio or watching a Korean drama on television without subtitles.

Before I tell you why I think it is so hard, let me tell you why it is not.

It is not because of my lack of talent in learning languages. Besides learning ancient Latin and Greek at school, I speak Dutch, English, French, and German, so Korean is my fifth living language. I have always loved languages and spent countless hours studying grammar, speaking to foreigners, and reading books. I know the difference between the subject and an object in a phrase, understand the four different cases in German, and memorized long lists of exceptions when it comes to verb conjugations or word genders.

It is also not difficult because of the different alphabet, called Hangeul (한글).

Korean alphabet

Korean is not written in the Latin alphabet but has its own characters that don’t make much sense to people outside Korea. It seems complicated because the letters are grouped in syllables, which are combinations of two, three, or sometimes four letters. And it doesn’t help that they keep on writing the syllables one after the other, without much punctuation and capitals, and adding spaces at seemingly random places. Korean has a lot in common with Chinese, but Hangeul was invented in the 15th Century by King Sejong the Great to simplify writing for the masses. Only forty basic letters replaced the many thousands of Chinese characters. You can learn to recognize them in a few weeks. After a month, I could read the signs on the street or the text messages on my phone that kept coming in. I just didn’t have a clue what they meant.

Korean is also an easy language in some sense. The words don’t have gender, there are no articles (the, a, an), the verb conjugations are pretty regular, and there are just a few tense conjugations that are simple to remember. Also, although the word order is different from English, it is always the same, and after a while, it is not too hard to remember how to sequence the words. Korean phrases always start with the subject and end with the verb.

So, if it is not my lack of language ability, not that difficult to read or write Hangeul, and the language is not that hard in many other aspects, then why is it so hard to master the Korean language?

In my opinion, the problems arise from these four major items:

1. Lack of recognition

2. The context

3. The lack of pronouns

4. Gluing words

Lack of recognition

Depending on who you ask, The Korean language has between 500,000 and 1,100,000 words. Luckily, most of these words are from ancient times or local dialects and are not needed. The average Korean person would only know around 60,000 words. As a foreigner, if you want to speak Korean comfortably in typical daily situations, you only need to know at least 3,000 to 6,000 words. That is not so wildly different from other languages like English. The problem is that, apart from some American loanwords, almost all of the words have no resemblance to what you already know unless you speak Chinese or Japanese. There are no word parts to recognize, and your brain has no hook to link the new words to. Many words I had to learn ten times over and over before they finally stuck in my brain.

The context

The Korean language is entirely dominated by the circumstances under which it is spoken. In many other languages, there are some variations if you want to talk to someone with respect or not. In French, we have the word “tutoyer,” which literally means saying “tu” instead of “vous,” which you would only do to friends or lower-ranking persons. But this distinction only applies to a few words. In Korean, everything you say needs consideration of what you say, who you are talking to, and what situation you are talking to each other. Every conversation requires an assessment of your ranking on the social ladder with respect to the other to determine if you need polite speech or can get away with casual speech. At the same time, it matters if you are in a formal situation, like in a job interview, or a doctor’s office, giving a presentation, or reading the news on television. In such a case, you will need to use formal speech. The combination of these two dimensions leads to four different speeches to learn (formal polite, formal casual, informal polite, and informal casual). It is even further complicated as polite or casual language depends on whether you talk about yourself or the other. And written Korean is different again, with many unique words only found on street signs, but nobody would ever say them.

If you are lost by now, I get that. This is precisely my point. For Korean people, this all comes naturally, but for a foreigner, it can be challenging to grasp when to use which kind of speech, and even if you manage to learn that perfectly, you still need to know all the different speeches and word variations.

The lack of pronouns

Another significant complication is the lack of pronouns for other people. Korean does have words for “I” and “we” but does not really have anything for “you,” “he,” “she,” “yours,” “they,” etc. Instead, if you want to talk about someone else, you will have to use that person’s given name, and if you don’t know that person’s name, you should use their role. This could be “teacher,” “older sister,” “uncle,” ”boss,” “grandfather,” and so on. Even if he is not your grandfather, you could still refer to someone else as a grandfather if he is old enough to be a grandfather. As a foreigner, it is very hard to decide how to call someone because it feels weird, and you could easily make a mistake and get an odd look on their face.

Gluing words

In English and similar languages, almost every word is separate in a phrase. In Korean, however, words are glued together all the time. The same verb can have 50+ different add-ons, of which the meaning is expressed in separate words in English. For example, the words “but,” “while,” “can,” “have to,” “try to,” “must be,” “shall we,” “am going to,” etc. are not separate words, but add-ons to the verb it refers to. Some of them require the usage of the stem of the verb, some the conjugated version. Some are only in the present tense, others also in the past tense. And to top it all off, it is not uncommon to do the gluing trick three or four times in one phrase.

Well, that’s it. Nothing beats the feeling if you can speak to a Korean stranger on the street, order something in a restaurant or ask the taxi driver to take another turn, and they actually understand you!

So what if I still want to learn Korean?

That’s a good start. You have to be motivated to overcome the difficulties, and if you are already discouraged by the points above, you probably won’t make it.

In my experience, the most important things for learning Korean are:

1. Spend as much time as possible in the beginning. Every hour spent close to the rest of your learning hours is better spent. Your brain needs repetition and can remember better when it can correlate what it learns to something fresh in mind. So better spend one week of 20 hours of learning than ten weeks of 2 hours of learning. And one thing is for sure: even though it is difficult, it is also fun.
2. Learn all four significant parts of language learning: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. It may be tempting to focus on conversation only, but a language makes much more sense if you take the full breadth. If you know how to write a word, you can pronounce it better. If you have to write the word, you start paying attention to it and remember it better. If you read a sign on the street, you will be tempted to find out what it means.
3. Practice every day. Go out on the street and meet people. Try to talk to them and learn some useful sentences to keep the conversation going, like “Can you repeat that please?”, “I didn’t understand that.”, “Could you speak more slowly?” and so on.
4. Make lists for yourself of words you want to remember. You can categorize them and memorize them before you go to sleep.
5. Watch Korean drama series on Netflix. They are fun to watch, and you learn a lot of new words if you pay attention.
6. Follow some Korean language teachers on Instagram. Many publish daily posts with helpful tips and new words.

And last but not least. Be patient. In the end, you will be able to speak Korean, as long as you keep on going!