Why are you studying Korean?

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quevagibe
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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby quevagibe » 2007-10-13, 17:10

Nolan Llyss wrote:
quevagibe wrote:I think it could be easy to pick up given i lived in Japan for 2 years and the similarity to Japanese. although maybe i am proved wrong.


Indeed. Korean has an alphabet while Japanese has not. I am not a specialist but I think the 2 languages are completely different and have nothing in common.


have to diagree with you here. japanes also has an alphabet, 2 in fact, but also kanji. they both also have roots in chinese, where a significant proportion of both of their vocabulary comes from.

having just started a korean class, i can also add that my knowledge of japanese has certainly aided me in understanding the concepts much more easily than my classmates who arent familiar with either.
In fact, the basic korean grammar has a similar strucutre and word order to japanese.

Śrāmaṇera

Postby Śrāmaṇera » 2008-05-23, 13:59

OK, I´ve been reading lots of resources about this matter since last time :D .

I have a growing interest in Korea and its language now and I would like to start learning it. The problem is I´ve been learning Japanese for about one year on my own (at my own pace, I learn languages for pleasure only most of the time...) and I am now afraid I could get a lot confused if I learn both Japanese and Korean at the same time.

What do you think?

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Postby Rounin » 2008-05-24, 2:48

That is certainly something people will often warn you about; However, Korean and Japanese have enough similarities that it will also be a tremendous aid to understanding the parts that are similar. An advice I've been given is to start out with one language first and then become fairly proficient in that before starting out with a similar one. At that point, the risk of confusing the two might be smaller, and there might be greater benefits.

Let's examine the grammar first. While Korean and Japanese can't be shown to share a common lineage, the two languages share the same kind of grammar, so that while there are significant differences that have to be learned, a lot of grammatical concepts can be grasped intuitively right away, or simply be learned as "the equivalent of the Japanese form [X]".

Then there's the vocabulary. When it comes to the most basic words which you'll have to learn a lot of, the two languages are like night and day. However, as soon as you come to the Chinese-derived words which make up a significant portion of both languages, the similarities are so large that a lot of words can be picked up simply by learning the appropriate sound changes to the onyomi of the Chinese characters used for writing the word.

As an example, I was talking to a Korean person about licorice once, which is commonly used as candy in Northern Europe, and I mentioned how there was a Chinese-derived word for it in Japanese, kanzou, or "sweet grass" — Perhaps the word gamcho existed in Korean as well? "Ah, gamcho!" he replied. "— that's medicine."

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Postby linguist07 » 2008-05-31, 7:32

This is great to find more people interested in Korean. I just finished taking second year at my university and I loved it. I became interested in Korean after studying Japanese and meeting some Korean students in my class. Definitely if you know one it will make studying the other easier.
Send me an email if you wanna practice (or if you happen to start another online Korean class).

안녕!

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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby polishboy » 2008-12-18, 0:24

Nolan Llyss wrote:
quevagibe wrote:I think it could be easy to pick up given i lived in Japan for 2 years and the similarity to Japanese. although maybe i am proved wrong.


Indeed. Korean has an alphabet while Japanese has not. I am not a specialist but I think the 2 languages are completely different and have nothing in common.


I think they have much in common.
Vocabulary.
Like Erupoean languges have roots in Latin and Greek, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese have roots in Chinese.

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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby polishboy » 2009-02-16, 14:04

I have very big reason to learn Korean!
guess what?
Or rather who?
:ohwell:
My girlfriend!

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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby karmaplace » 2009-04-09, 18:29

I'm an East Asian Studies major at my university. I had been taking Japanese for one year and decided I wanted to try two languages at once. Started Korean on a whim (I didn't want to take Mandarin Chinese because I'm still absolute pants at Japanese kanji), and LOVED it.

I'm living in Korea now, teaching English, so I get lots of practice. :)

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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby Kasuya » 2010-06-12, 23:49

I'd been toying with the idea of learning Korean for years. I was trying to choose between Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese... and Korean has won out as the language I will give the most priority to after Japanese. My reasons are that I like quite a bit of Korean music and movies, the number of attractive Korean girls per capita is the best in the world as far as I can tell, Hangeul looks pretty cool, Chinese characters are still used in some situations (I wish they'd be used more though), it'd be cool to read about Korean and Asian politics in Korean (I know I've learned a lot from being able to read Japanese news), because I know Japanese pretty well I expect to have a much easier time with Korean than I would have with Chinese or Vietnamese.

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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby etoile » 2010-06-21, 11:36

I'm learning it because once the music dragged me in, that was it - I was hooked. I was pulled in mainly because of how it sounds - I love the way it flows - but 한글 is pretty too.

Boingy88 wrote:That's okay. You don't see many females into this kind of stuff so it's bound to happen. Honestly we need more girls on here! :lol:

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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby Śrāmaṇera » 2010-06-24, 11:17

I can now officially READ 한글. Yeah :D

I thought it was going to take something like two weeks (the time I needed to remember the Japanese かな syllabaries) but Hangeul was learnt in less than 3 hours! It's a very enjoyable script to learn.

But I don't like the Microsoft entry system for Korean, I wonder if I should put some stickers on my keyboard or... ?

After studying 2 beginner level lessons, I felt as if I was studying Japanese again from the beginning. The syntax is almost the same, the words of Chinese origin sound like their Japanese equivalent most of the time.

But... the absence of 漢字 in today's Korean confuses me too much. I think I would learn much faster with them. :( Anyway, Korean seems very logical to learn after studying Japanese.

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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby Rounin » 2010-06-24, 17:55

Nejimakidori wrote:I can now officially READ 한글. Yeah :D

First of all, congratulations on reaching an important milestone!

Nejimakidori wrote:I thought it was going to take something like two weeks (the time I needed to remember the Japanese かな syllabaries) but Hangeul was learnt in less than 3 hours! It's a very enjoyable script to learn.

This was a wonderful surprise for me too! Not only Hangeul syllables, but even individual Hangeul characters are built up according to a logical system. They aren't kidding when they say it's an ingenious script.

Nejimakidori wrote:But I don't like the Microsoft entry system for Korean, I wonder if I should put some stickers on my keyboard or... ?

If you're going to be using the layout a lot, perhaps it's just as well to not rely on stickers though? At any rate, there is sort of a system to the layout:

The left-hand side of the keyboard contains the consonants. On the bottom row are the aspirated plosives, in the order k, t, ch, p, from left to right. On the top row are the unaspirated versions of the ones in the bottom row: g, d, j, b, but in the opposite order, from right to left. In the middle row are the remaining consonants.

On the right-hand side are the vowels. The basic vowels are placed in the middle row and the bottom row, and the vowels formed by combining a vowel with i are placed on the top row, except for yu, which is placed next to u on the bottom row. Yo, yeo and ya are placed directly above o, eo and a. Unfortunately, there's no consistent system beyond that as far as I know.

Nejimakidori wrote:After studying 2 beginner level lessons, I felt as if I was studying Japanese again from the beginning. The syntax is almost the same, the words of Chinese origin sound like their Japanese equivalent most of the time.

But... the absence of 漢字 in today's Korean confuses me too much. I think I would learn much faster with them. :( Anyway, Korean seems very logical to learn after studying Japanese.

I agree with you there. Students of Japanese and Chinese taking up Korean could absolutely benefit from having textbooks with hanja in them. Fortunately, it's quite simple to look up the hanja for a new word online though, for instance at http://alldic.nate.com/ and http://dic.naver.com/ .

Śrāmaṇera

Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby Śrāmaṇera » 2010-06-25, 0:11

Thanks for the keyboard description. I didn't even notice the consonants were on the left and the vowels on the right, I was too focused on the jamo I needed to type and didn't take time to have a good look at it really.

I'll check these links too, and next time I'll type something without using stickers :)

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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby eddeux » 2011-03-07, 22:52

I started studying Korean about two years ago, but it wasn't serious study till about a year ago. I was looking for a french pen pal to improve my French, and I got messages from like a ton of Koreans! I still talk to a few today and I'd really consider 'em friends, so as I learned more about them I became more interested in Korean. And wallah! And of course now there are a lot of Koreans in my city, so I have a lot of people to practice with, and a few of my best friends are Korean or half. Plusss, Korean just sounds amazing to me, and I love Hangul. It's a unique writing system.

I just can't wait for the day that I actually get to visit South Korea. I'd love to stay for an extended period of time to improve my Korean. Maybe then I could work up the nerve to enter a conversation with the Korean family that runs the Korean store I like to visit......
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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby モモンガ » 2011-06-30, 14:35

네, 나도 한국 친구가 많아서 한국어를 공부하고 있어.

근데 이 포럼은 좀 비네

내 생각에는 한국말이 잠 재미있는 언어야.
난 한국 연재극이 좋아해.
그리고 펜팔 사이트에서 한국 소녀가 아주 많아.

인터팔스에서 한국어가 영어 뒤에 가장 자주 말하는 언어였어

지금은 좀 다르지만, 중국 사람이나 일본 사람보다 훨씬 많지.
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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby Meera » 2011-07-27, 3:32

I'm studdying Korean because I'm teaching at an ESL center and there are 16 Korean speakers ( and there are only twenty students) in the class i'm helping to teach. But they have kind of sparked my interest to learn it.
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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby Linguistic14 » 2011-08-01, 1:31

Hi guys.
The reason I started to study Korean was because of a big goal I wanted. The big goal was to learn all of the South Eastern Asian Language. Currently I have learned Japanese from my mom who was born from Japan, Chinese from an online class and Korean (by self teaching). Other than those three, I am trying to learn Thai and Vietnamese.
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Re: Why are you studying Korean?

Postby Luna_Lovegood » 2011-08-04, 16:51

I am learning All Asian language too!
The most important ones, of course.
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