Who's Learning Korean?

PinkDiamond wrote: Did you see the link I posted? It talks about subject/topic particles.

wrote: @Train: Are you asking if you always need to use subject/topic particles?

train wrote: But from what i understand Japanese is harder then Korean
is that right?? or for you Japanese is easier that Korean,,,,,
good luck in both :)

cityhunter83 wrote: when you read, your brain doesnt look at the letters and put the sounds together, it looks at the shape of the words and remembers what the shape is, the same way you know a triangle is a triangle or a square is a sqaure. you only fall back on phonics when the word is unfamilliar.

when you use sight words you start with a list of basic words that you are likely to see all the time and memorize them. when i taught my daughter to read english i taught her the alphabet and once she had that down i put words on individual cards and we would review the words a few times a day. i started with five cards. once she could recognize the words on the flash cards i would use the cards to construct sentences. at first i would just ask her if she knew any of the words, i would read the sentence pointing to each word in turn and she would say the words she knew. instead of forcing her to sound out words she hadnt learned (english is very hard to sound out. an "a" alone makes 8 different sounds), i would simply tell her what they were. eventually i found that she was reading words that we hadnt "officially" gone over b/c she was remembering them from when she asked what they were. she was also sounding out words better than children taught to read by phonics (sounding words out) b/c she would look at a word and instead of just sounding it out she would think of other words she knew that looked similar and start from there. it works really well. she will be six in august and reads on a 6th grade level.

i have taught her the words for korean numbers using the same method. despite not having a good grasp on the vowels, she recognizes the words and can read them.

kurinezumi wrote: Obviously in terms of reading, there is a lot more to learn in Japanese than there is in Korean, so I think the learning curve at the beginning is steeper, but once you get used to kanji and all that, it is actually quite useful when learning new words using kanji you already know.

In terms of grammar, they are very similar, so I don't think you can really say one is all that much harder than the other.

Socially, I think that Korea is a lot stricter in their levels of politeness and respect, so I think Korean is mariginally more difficult to speak in a socially appropriate way.

BUT, whichever you learn first, the other will be way easier to pick up because there really are tons of similarities. And if you intend to learn both I think there is an advantage to struggling with Japanese first. In Japanese you have no choice but to deal with kanji, and a lot of those kanji compounds can be carried over directly into Korean (with only slight, but fairly regular, changes in pronunciation). In Korean, especially if you are only learning as a second language, you will not learn as many kanji (if any) and the similarities will not be as intuitive when going to Japanese.

Of course, I may just think that because I learned Japanese first... (Korean native speakers seem to learn Japanese much faster than native Japanese learn Korean... but that might just be the people I know...) And for learning Korean I primarily use textbooks written for Japanese speakers and take a weekly class (also for native Japanese speakers)...