Is Korean Hard To Learn? (Explained!)

For a native English speaker, Korean is going to be very hard to learn. Learning any foreign language is going to take time, so when you take a language as different from English as Korean, that time is going to take considerably longer. It’s about as difficult to learn as a language can get.

Learning Korean is an incredibly rewarding experience that you will feel was more than worth the time spent to get there.

However, there’s no honey coating just how long it will take you to get there and how much difficulty you’ll have along the way.

That said, you should not despair, help is at hand.

Let’s find out more.

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How difficult is Korean to learn?

There’s no two ways about it: learning Korean is very difficult for a native English speaker, or indeed a native of any Indo-European language.

The native language you grew up on is going to be a big determining factor in how difficult a language is to learn.

English and Korean are in entirely different language families on entirely different continents, and while obviously all languages on earth are somehow related, for all intents and purposes, Korean and English are not.

Learning a language, as mentioned, is always difficult, and will take time.

Whether it is as closely related to your own language as possible, while still being a foreign language, or with absolutely no relationship at all, learning it is always going to be difficult.

You’ll have to prepare yourself for long, consistent hours of study, and even after all that, many would say you then go out and learn the language for real by immersing yourself in it.

This is also going to be a factor in how efficiently you learn the language.

Lessons are of course absolutely necessary and you’ll need to spend a long time studying, but you’re going to get a grip on the language much more quickly if you’re able to live in the country and speak it constantly with natives.

This is of course not possible for everyone, but it will unfortunately make it more difficult if you aren’t able to.

With all of your expectations set, then, it’s also worth pointing out that learning Korean is still something that lots of native English speakers do.

Some people may have some natural affinity for the process of language learning that gives them an advantage, but that’s generally nothing you can’t pick up yourself.

In other words, it’s hard, but nothing you can’t handle with a bit of determination.

How long does it take to learn Korean?

Languages, for English speakers, are separated into categories based on how difficult they are to learn and how much time it takes to learn them.

There are five of these categories, and Korean is a category 5, of which there is no higher category.

According to this metric, then, Korean is as difficult a language to learn is it gets.

Learning it will take around 2200 hours, at least, of study, so you’d typically be able to complete your studies in around two years.

By the end of these two years, you’ll certainly have a great foundation for actually going out and speaking the language.

However, as mentioned, many still consider this to be only the start of the process.

In order to become fluent or native in the language, you’ll then have to go and immerse yourself in the language and spend a lot of time talking it with Korean speakers.

From this point to full mastery and speaking like a native, it could take as much as five years.

Different people do learn at different rates, and it can often depend on your circumstances.

At the very least, though, you are looking at two years of study and another couple of years to fully acclimatize yourself.

What is the hardest part of learning Korean?

There are many difficult aspects of Korean, but one aspect of learning the language that has no equivalent in English is particles.

Particles are a grammatical part of Korean which serve as sentence markers, and we do nothing like this in English.

For many learning Korean, this is one of the most difficult aspects of the language.

Particles serve a number of different purposes, such as altering the level of formality, and this can take time to master.

Is Korean easy to read?

Korean is not exactly easy to read, and it does present an added difficulty in that on top of the language, you also have to learn a new alphabet.

However, relatively speaking, the Korean alphabet is somewhat easier to learn than you might think.

There are only 24 letters in Hangul, the Korean writing system, made up of 14 consonants and ten vowels.

Learning this obviously adds to the difficulty compared with learning a language that uses the same alphabet as English, but again, it is relatively easy to get a grip on and with some time and practice you should have no trouble with it.

So, you’ve certainly got a lot of studying ahead of you if you want to become fluent in Korean.

It is a language fundamentally entirely different from English, with only the most distant relationship.

That said, we all have more or less the same innate ability to learn languages, with some having only superficial advantages.

Learning Korean may be difficult, but plenty before you have done it, and you’re just as well equipped to learn as they were!
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