Is Korean Hard to Learn? It Has Been for Me!

Today I want to talk about my struggles with Korean.

I want to talk a bit about how I have learned different languages,

what the process has been for me, where I have had success and

why, and where I have struggled.

Some of the languages that I have struggled in include Korean,

Arabic, and I'm going to go into why. Today I'm gonna talk about Korean.

My initial exposure to Korean was in 1972.

That's a long time ago.

My wife and I were living in Japan.

We went to Korea on a visit just to see it.

I was very interested in a country on the continent of Asia

with some kind of language relationship to Japanese in terms of being of North

Asia origin in its basic structure, an agglutinative language, and, of course, with

an awful lot of boring from Chinese in the case of both Korean and Japanese.

And of course, tremendous cultural borrowing from China.

So I was very interested.

Had a great visit when Korea was, I guess, considered a developing

country, but it was really developing as we now know. I went again in 1976.

A good friend was at the Canadian Embassy there.

He was getting married.

He wanted me to be best man at his wedding.

He married a Korean lady, so I did that.

At that time, I bought some books for learning Korean, and I'm gonna show you

my library of books for learning Korean.

Yeah, but I didn't do much with it.

I went back to Japan, where again, I was living at the time.

And then in 1980 I visited Korea.

I was working for Atomic Energy of Canada.

I thought I was gonna be very much involved with Korea because Canada

was building a nuclear reactor in Korea.

But in the end, I only spent one year with Atomic Energy of Canada.

Then I went back to the forest industry.

And so again, my initial sort of spurt of Korean study kind of went down the

tubes, but still it was out there.

And then, you may know that in 2003 I wrote my book, The Linguist, about my

experiences in Learning nine Languages, which at that time, didn't include

Korean, and then we got started with LingQ.

At any rate, I said, "You know what? I should get back to Korean!"

So I bought some more books.

We didn't have Korean at LingQ. One book, which was very good, which I

really enjoyed was the Introduction to Korean, I think it's called.

You'll see when I'll show you my library. Done here at the

University of British Columbia.

The narrators'

voices were so good, and that's so important in any

kind of learning material.

You can't have these beginner books with a boring narrator. It just turns me off.

And that was kind of the high point of my enthusiasm for Korean.

Also, the book was full of patterns.

Language learning is about patterns.

They had grammatical explanations, they had terms like copulative verbs. Strange.

But I ignored all those explanations.

I just

accepted the patterns, listened to the patterns, listened to the dialogues,

which were kind of semi-humorous dialogues. Students situations that I

was kind of more or less familiar with.

Not too heavy on the sort of cultural traditions and that kind of thing,

which is more difficult because they're less familiar. And that was kind

of, as I say, the high point of my enthusiasm for learning Korean.

So I bought more books, but more and more of these books, they were all so boring.

And so I started losing interest. And at that time, instead I became

interested in Russian and we had Russian at LingQ. And pretty soon Korean

was in the rear view mirror and I was spending all my time on Russian.

I spent a lot of time on Russian.

There was very interesting content, political content, literature,

audio books, so much good content.

We had it at LingQ and so I was off with

learning Russian. And then Czech and then other languages.

Although I have made regular attempts to sort of restart my Korean, and

you'll see here when I show you my statistics that 2010 at various times

I've said, "Okay, I should put in three months, you know, a 90-day challenge."

See what I can do to get my Korean up to a better level.

And I think I have improved.

Or did improve, but then of course I didn't use it for the longest time.

I'll show you a video at the end here of me speaking Korean with my tutor

after one of my 90-day challenges.

But still, it was difficult at LingQ for a variety of reasons.

You know, we had some beginner content.

We didn't have the Mini Stories.

The intermediate content was quite uninteresting.

What I attempted to do

was find podcasts. And then I actually paid someone to transcribe these podcasts so

that I could work my way through these.

But they were very difficult.

One was a literary podcast, the other was a political podcast.

I just fought my way through these.

It was so hard.

So many unknown words.

And of course in Korean there's so many little words that have eight possible

meanings and I didn't know which meaning was appropriate, and we didn't yet have

Sentence View as we now have, where I could get a sentence translation, which

would help me decide which of the sort of translations of that word was accurate.

I'll show you how I go through Korean on LingQ today, and you'll see that.

There are more sort of user hints from other users who have looked up words

and I can quickly see the most likely translation of a word and looking

at the sentence, meaning I can get a better sense of what it means.

None of that was available before.

LingQ was slow, slower before, it was just hard going. So there were

too many headwinds.

It was just too difficult.

So I was always attracted away to something else.

So, you know, again, thinking back to that sort of high point of my enthusiasm

for Korean, there is that quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar where

Brutus says, "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which if taken at the

flood, will lead to success," or something.

So if I had continued when I was most enthusiastic, and if I had had less

difficulty, or if there had been more

interesting content available, or if LingQ had worked better, or if the

dictionaries were better, if all of these conditions, if the attraction

had been greater and the resistance had been less, then I think I would've

continued and achieved a better level.

However, all the effort that I have put into Korean is not lost.

I have, according to my statistics, some 40-, 50,000 known words,

which theoretically is a lot.

Now, in all of these languages, it depends on how we count words.

There are a lot of different endings to words in Korean that,

you know, help define the function of the word in a sentence.

So it's not something we can compare to other languages. But I have a large

base of, you know, vocabulary.

And even of comprehension. And my Chinese helps, of course. So that if I were to go

to Korea...but I don't have the freedom.

I have a family.

I have other things that I'm doing.

I can't just go off to Korea for two months and be with people

and speak Korean all the time.

But if I were to do that, I think I could bring it up to a decent level.

Nevertheless, I am disappointed.

I feel that, you know, having first bought books for Korean back

in 1973, so that's a long time.

I've had those books a long time.

I've put a lot of effort into Korean.

If I were to open up some of these books that are on my bookshelf, you'll see

that there's underlinings and tick marks and all kinds of things, but you know,

you need to have meaningful, interesting content that you can stay with.

Which I have for Persian right now. That you're not deliberately trying to learn.

I was too much deliberately trying to learn the language

rather than enjoying the language.

Once you get to where you can enjoy the language, even if the

progress is slow, it's enjoyable.

I got to where the Korean wasn't enjoyable, it was work.

And when it's work, you know, I find that it's harder to commit the

time necessary to be successful.

So I'm gonna end up here with showing you me working on Korean at LingQ.

And also after that you'll see a video, as I say, of a conversation

I had about nine years ago after one of my 90-day challenges.

So I haven't given up on Korean, but it's been a long time and I haven't achieved

what I would have liked to have achieved.

Thanks for listening.

Bye for now.

Yeah, I just wanna show you, you know, how I study on LingQ here.

I'm going to use the computer version.

I could also do it on my iPad.

You can see here that our Korean page has improved tremendously, so we now have so

much content here to choose from. Literary,

audio books, ab workout, you know, all kinds of different stuff.

Getting started, you know, we have our Mini Stories, which we never had before.

To that extent, it's a lot better.

I can even select the level that I want to be looking at in terms of content.

But I'll give you an example.

So here's this thing I found.

This is imported from YouTube.

We now have the ability to import things from YouTube,

which wasn't the case before.

So here's a lesson that I found in our library.

I could have gone to YouTube to find it myself, but at any rate,

so I can click on this thing.

Okay.

So it's kind of childish, but something I might do. Okay, if I go here.

So I can listen to the audio just for that sentence.

I can look up individual words, which I could do before, but it's much faster.

So I have all these different meanings, with the most likely

one up at the top. Show translation.

Now, if it becomes more of a sentence, you'll see here.

So this is not exactly fascinating content, but it just shows you

how LingQ has improved with the introduction of, you know,

the ability to import content.

And I'm gonna show you this, but you can see that you

can import MP3 files, eBooks, lessons, so I can bring material in.

If I import an Audio Transcribe, the Whisper AI will give me a transcript

so that I will create a lesson from it.

So there's so many different types of content that I can use that the whole

experience has become much more agreeable.

If I go to a website like Chosun Ilbo here, and they've had floods in Korea,

and if I pick an article about the floods like this one, and I go to our

web browser, our browser extension, and I can import it. And it'll come into

LingQ so I can study it as a lesson.

All right, we'll just wait a few seconds while it comes in.

And I... one of the things that has changed compared to previously is the

tremendous availability of things that I can import with a click, using our

browser extension. From YouTube, from articles in newspapers, and so forth.

I open up the lesson.

I have a lesson.

All right.

You'll notice that there is a lot of blue text.

These are unknown words.

I have about 13,000 words, known words in Persian, and if I go import

something into LingQ, you will see that there are far fewer new

words, having spent far less time on Persian, I understand much more of it.

Look at this.

There are just two blue words here.

You can see that in the case of Persian, you know, if I go to

my all time numbers here, I've been at it since 2018 and kind of like a peak

known words addition is like 1,000.

And that's a peak most of the time.

It's quite a bit less than that.

If I go and look at my Korean situation, despite the amount of time that I spent

on it, you know, and, and you can see it goes back to 2010, and there are days

where I hit like 4,000 known words added.

Now I'm helped by the fact that I know Chinese, and so I can plow

forward in Korean. And I will add more and more known words, but

it'll still be difficult for me.

So I have this greater sense of just working and working and not

getting anywhere in Korean, as opposed to in Persian