Yesterday I met up with Mr. Harry Quek, Principal of Daehan Korean Language Centre and he nearly convinced me to start learning Korean. Maybe I actually will. After I master Mandarin.
One reason for learning Korean is of course Korea’s pop culture, the dramas and K-Pop. That cannot be a reason for me though. My music preferences were shaped in my teens and early twenties, and I don’t think much will change that. I guess it’s the same for most people, you will stick with the music and other pop culture of the time when you were between 15-25 years old. A reason the 60s still loom so large is that they are the baby boom generation’s youth memories.
But Harry came with a totally unexpected reason, namely that Korean writing system is so incredibly efficient. I cannot read or write Korean, but the gist is this. The Latin alphabet (as used in English and most European languages) groups sounds into words. This makes it easy to learn and write, as there are only 26 symbols to learn. Chinese, on the other hand, has characters that each represent a syllable. Chinese is quicker to read as the language is much more compact. Meaning that a given amount of information needs less ‘centimeters’ of running text, less distance for the eye to travel. For comparison:
- I am from the Netherlands
- 我是荷兰人
In Chinese, each syllable is presented by a ‘block’. However, as there are thousands of characters and they are not phonetic, learning Chinese writing takes a long time. So the Latin alphabet is easy to learn; the Chinese writing system is easy to read.
The word "Hangul" in Hangul. Each syllable is a 'block'. Each block is composed of phonetic consonants and vowels
The Korean alphabet (Hangul), combines the strength of both systems. There are 14 consonants and 10 vowels, and they are combined in characters. Altogether that means Korean can express an enormous deal of sounds within each character, yet it’s easy to learn as there are only 24 basic symbols to remember.
According to Harry, the speed of writing and reading is an important factor behind the success of Naver. Koreans hardly use Google when they are looking for something online, but rather use Naver. Naver, however, is not based on algorithms that scour the web, but on input by its users. Koreans contributed and rate information about any imaginable subject, and this makes the quality of information a lot better than anything generated by a machine. This is only possible because of the speed of reading / writing in Korean; otherwise people would not bother.
So that gives me something to ponder. If Naver is world’s most powerful and updated knowledge database, then I want in! Do you think this is a good reason to learn the language?
If you sign up with Daehan, Mr. Quek will intro you on the Korean language as well. Check available courses in Singapore on our site if you want to start learning Korean!
About Guus Goorts
Guus has traveled widely and has lived in The Netherlands, Ghana, Belgium and Singapore. In descending order of fluency, he speaks Dutch, English, Mandarin, German and some rudiments of Spanish, French and Italian. Guus lives in Singapore with his wife and two young children. He settled in Singapore in early 2006 from his native country The Netherlands. After working in a job for corporate training, he founded Yago Languages, Singapore's guide to language learning.
Hmm, interesting. I know no Korean, but if Korean really is a phonetic/compactness combo, then we’ve got a winner here. I just wonder why the Chinese didn’t take up the writing system, which, after all, was devised by the Chinese during the Tang dynasty as gratitude to Korean military-political support for something.
Personally, I’m an unrepentant Europhile and I would say my preference is for something easy to learn like the Latin alphabet first (since, not without good reason, I think, because we have to learn from a young age). Once we have learnt the easy-to-learn thing, speed tends to pick up as a natural result. It’s a bit like riding a bicycle – it isn’t too hard to pick up the ropes, but once you got going, then it’s pretty much a breeze to ramp up the speed and other techniques. After that, who knows – motorbikes (in my case) or something fast and furious or slow and steady? If it’s something quite hard to pick up (like Chinese), the uphill struggle outset when the motivation to carry on is most important, it’s just a bit self-defeating in my mind.
But I might have to reconsider my position, now that I’ve seen your picture example.
It seems Korea only made a definite switch in the early 90s. Habits are hard to kill. What is easiest is not always apparent, because what is familiar (the Latin alphabet) may objectively not be the easiest to learn.
Would be interesting to know statistics on how long it will take someone to master Latin / Chinese / Hangul writing methods. In these things I rather trust experimental outcomes than my own impressions as I’m biased as can be.
I’m not jumping to conclusions or siding with one position at the expense of the other, but personally I find Latin (and even Classical Greek) far easier to pick up than Chinese. I’m biased in this because I was learning Chinese in the UK and there just wasn’t enough opportunity around to use what had been learnt. (Also due to the fact that I was studying Chinese in drips and draps, since the other regular school subjects were relatively more important.) It took me seven years of learning Chinese, and I still can’t read or write Chinese. On the bright side, it usually takes me two or three weeks to pick up enough Farsi (Iranian) to have a notionally understandable conversation – usually quicker with a nice-looking Persian lady!
With Latin, we’re dealing with only one set of 22/26 standalone variables (if that doesn’t sound too much a contradiction in terms). I reckon what takes a RELATIVELY longer time to learn Latin than it does English is that only the inner technology of the Latin language (the grammar, the vocabulary, the declensions, voices, cases, etc) differ from Modern Standard English (but not too radically, I should add). (I’m not even talking about Ecclesiastical Latin, which presents its own unique problems for learning.) All things being equal, it’s about the same time learning French, German, Italian, Latin, Classical Greek or whatever as learning English if we’re as an ESL student. But that’s just my experience.
By contrast, Chinese has a lot more going on at the same time. There are more inner technologies for the mind to deal with – the most prominent being the interlocking radicals and strokework that can impart totally different meanings in writing. The ‘regular’ inner technologies (in speaking and writing) makes for quite a challenge too – Latin, English or any other European language are chiefly subject- and tense/time-driven languages, compared with tenseless topic-driven languages like Chinese, Japanese and most other Oriental languages.
Experimental results are useful, but the problem with them is that they come from linguistics – and most linguists are prescriptivists at heart since, with good reason, theirs is an area of study that requires a formalised (i.e. static) framework for analysis. For the rest of us, we just want to learn the language and move on, content to make mistakes along the way. Regardless of empirical results, I would guess that all things being equal it still takes longer to learn Chinese, Korean, Japanese or any other Eastern languages than European ones.
@Robert – Agreed. What language is actually easiest to learn is subjective and depends very much on your point of view. Most of the time, when one complication is left out, something else is put in place instead of it.
In my early comment, I was only referring to writing methods and the time it takes to master either. I think we can all agree that the Latin alphabet is a lot easier to master than Chinese characters. By primary school ending, I was reading the newspapers and I don’t think many Chinese kids do that.
I’m just wondering whether Hangul might be even faster to learn, or whether the time and effort needed to master it is comparable to the Latin alphabet and other similar writing methods, such as Greek and Cyrillic.
[...] big winner with 116 votes so far, followed at some distance by Korean (74 votes). I had expected Korean to win by a wide margin, but of course Japanese holds very good cards too. Such [...]