back
2 comments
> Compare this to Korean where you can learn the writing system in a single day

I really, REALLY wish people would stop saying this about Korean. Sure, there's a couple of dozen letters and you can learn their individual default pronunciations in a single day, I'm not doubting that.

But that literally doesn't get you even close to being able to correctly pronounce many common words, because, guess what, when these letters are together in a word they influence each other in different ways and their pronunciation changes or they may not even get pronounced at all.

There is a reason why all these "learn hangul in 1 hour" web pages/videos never mention the existence of four-letter syllables. ;)

Learning Japanese phonentic alphabet(s) on the other hand, really can be done in one day and they are consistent and phonetic and there's no weirdness in pronunciation, but of course then you have to deal with thousands of kanji too. So I guess from that perspective, Korean really is easier, but learning to correctly pronounce the sounds and words in Korean is in my opinion much harder than in Japanese.

I don’t fully agree with the trope of learning the writing system in one day kinda false.

I mean you can learn to map it to alphabet in one day, but unless you can grasp the subtleties of the pronunciation of the similar sounding vowels and consonants have you really learned what the characters represent?

Are you trying to create a strawman? How do you learn characters without their pronunciation? There is nothing else to learn other than that. If you know the "alphabet" equivalent then you can pronunciate words written in that alphabet. Nothing more. Nothing less.

There is one exception which is Japanese where many characters merely have a meaning associated to them which need to be combined to form words. Sure, you do have to blindly memorize that but often the kanji on its own doesn't have one pronunciation, it has many and therefore it doesn't make sense to memorize all of them. Instead you just have to associate the pronunciation of the entire word with a given combination of Japanese characters.

In my experience, I have found learning Korean more difficult than Chinese/Japanese. I've lived and studied in China to provide some background. My difficulty in Korean stems from the nuance of how the characters interact with each other in terms of pronunciation and grammar. Still interesting nonetheless, each person holds their own perspective on how challenging a language can be to learn.