Even though learning Hangul is manageable in terms of studying Korean due to it being an alphabet, what about the pronunciation? Is it actually that hard while Japanese phonology is considered “easier” to pick up. Don’t even forget to mention Mandarin (Chinese) as despite them also using a logographic script, they have about 4-5 tones meaning a word can connotate a different definition based on what you hear.
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Korean due to it being an alphabe
Technically, it’s not; it’s a syllabary like Japanese katakana and hiragana.
Is it actually that hard while Japanese phonology is considered “easier” to pick up.
Japanese is dead easy for an English speaker so long as they remember that vowel length matters, and the R is not a standard General American R.
Korean has a couple of sounds/features (tense consonants) not in use in General American, but nothing insurmountable. I’d call it more difficult but only very slightly so.
Tone
Korean is actually considered to be undergoing tonogenesis, so that’s kinda neat.
Tone isn’t a huge deal; even if you get it wrong, there’s usually only one thing that makes sense in the context of the sentence. Not a worry in Korean at the moment. Japanese has pitch accent which can cause the same issue (If I’m running through the field plucking はな (hana), you’re not going to think it means ‘nose’ here if I get the pitch accent wrong).
One can pick up reading Korean more quickly than Japanese (if no Kanji/Hanzi/Hanja experience otherwise), though I found bacchim to be annoying. In exchange, Korean tends to have some grammatical features lacking in Japanese, but I never got far enough to learn what those were (outside of some more forms of address/honorific).
On the point of tonogenesis in Korean, that actually solves the tense consonant issue for English speakers!
Neat! I have a video on the topic in my to-watch list, but hadn’t looked into the details yet so far.
My wife learned to read Korean and she said something similar. Korean is easy to read and write but harder to pronounce, while Japanese is the opposite.
i think korean isnt that hard to pick up. just make sure you dont romanise it. gotta make sure you get the tounge in the right place for the ㄹ’s
