What is so hard about learning Korean?

Recently, a man I met with to work on a new project, a man who has no previous experience with Korea, told me he’s going to start studying and learn Korean. I bit my tongue and said, “It’s really a difficult language.” I didn’t want to discourage him, but inwardly I’m thinking of all the “older” people I’ve known who have tried to learn Korean after the age of 40 and give up after a few months of trying.

It’s axiomatic that children’s brains are adapted to language learning — American kids learn English, Korean kids learn Korean. Something happens in human brains as they grow older and it becomes harder to learn languages. My best student from 35 years of teaching over one thousand students thinks he learned Korean well because his brain “ossified” late. He was a “late bloomer." He says he simply understood Korean — he didn’t study grammar rules, didn’t memorize vocab lists but just learned it, like a child.

Whatever theories there are for language learning, Korean is just a hard language. Why? Let me outline a few of many problem areas.

First is pronunciation. There are harder languages out there for pronunciation. Navajo has a lot of really difficult sounds. There are African languages that use clicks. Korean has a structure that is diametrically opposite to the structure of English. The consonants are really difficult, but the vowels are really easy and consistent, whereas English vowels are all over the place. There is more to be said about pronunciation, but I’ll leave it at that, lest I drive myself crazy thinking about it.

Next is vocabulary. Korean is diglossic, meaning there are two strands of its development and usage. Korean has a pure Korean base with an overlay of Chinese. English is likewise complicated, mixing Germanic languages with Latin and Greek. This means that in any given situation in Korea, there are two ways to describe things, using two different words to say basically the same thing.

I had a growth removed from my back once. The doctor sent it to the lab to make sure it wasn’t cancerous, and he called to report it was only “necrotic” tissue. Well, thank you, doctor. You flash a little Latin and I pay you $200. He could have said it was dead tissue. In English, medical, legal and scientific words tend to be Latin or Greek. The same thing can be seen in Korean, but the erudite alternative is used more frequently, and the native alternative less often. In other words, it’s much more confusing, and it isn’t always clear as to which you are using. If that sounds confusing, I achieved my goal in describing it.

Next is grammar. Korean has grammar from hell. Oops! I didn’t mean to say that. It just has really complicated, multifaceted and layered grammar. In some cases, it parallels English. In some cases, there is nothing like it in English.

Honorifics in Korean are tied to grammar and expressed in ways that look like grammar. This is where foreigners get into real trouble. It’s not only the grammar, or the way your sentence is structured, it’s also the words you use. Honorifics are the key to the next problem.

Korean handles subjects and objects very nicely, clearly marking them. But then you have the “pragmatics” of a thing that drives me crazy — subject avoidance. You usually avoid indicating what the subject of the sentence is. You can use a subject marker, but not if you don’t have a subject. How then does one know what the subject of the sentence is? Through the honorific! If an honorific is used in reference to you, you are the subject of the sentence. This gets really complicated.

As a measure of how difficult it is to understand the subject, look at machine translation like Google Translate, DeepL or ChatGPT. The most common mistake they make is to give you an incorrect subject. If they don’t know what it is, they assume it’s the speaker.

I gave a talk at the Defense Language Institute a few years ago, and my message was to say that for one who has studied Chinese and Japanese — both level four languages, on a one to four scale — Korean is level five.

If you are over 40 and you want to learn Korean, don’t get your hopes up. Try to get yourself a dozen phrases and call it quits. And get yourself one of those pocket-size translating machines.

Mark Peterson (frogoutsidethewell@gmail.com) is a professor emeritus of Korean studies at Brigham Young University in Utah. The views expressed here are his own.