People frequently send me messages asking me ‘I want to learn an Asian language but I’m worried it’s too hard. Which language is the hardest?” or more specifically “Out of Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which language is the hardest? I want to learn one but I want to learn the easier one”.
I spent a long time trying to answer these questions and will do so again here.
The first language I started learning was probably Korean. I was exposed to Korean a lot in secondary school when I was one of the few English students in a mostly Asian (predominantly Korean) classroom. It was here that my curiosity was piqued. I wanted to know what everyone was saying, I wanted to understand the joke when everyone suddenly burst out laughing and I wanted to be able to sing along to the latest K-pop songs that they played on repeat for hours.
Thanks to this exposure, when I finally did start learning Korean properly a few years later, I already had a feeling for the language. Sentences came more naturally to me, grammar seemed to slot into place and when my tutors asked me how I knew these things…the only response I could come up with was “A feeling?” and they promptly moved me straight into Intermediate Korean.
While hangeul (the Korean alphabet) can be learnt in a few hours, learning the language itself is much more difficult. The grammar is ridiculously complex with numerous particles that even many of my Korean friends use incorrectly. On top of that, Korean has seven levels of politeness. Yes, seven. While only five of them are in common usage, still that’s five!
That said, with practice, Korean is fairly easy to pronounce. Everything is phonetic and there are no “tricks”. Since most words come from Chinese characters, the vocabulary is fairly straight forward with many words having similar roots. (i.e 敎 = 교 and means ‘teachings’ => 교과 subject, 교과 과정 curriculum, 교과서 textbook).
As for Chinese, I started learning Chinese roughly three years ago. Chinese is a language that I have grown to love. As a kid, despite having any real reason, I always told my parents that I would learn Chinese and that I did.
Chinese is notorious for its difficult tones and mind-boggling characters. Chinese is definitely a language which requires a more intensive approach. It’s so alien to English speakers that without regular, focused study, it becomes impossible to progress.
However, once passed the basic stage of wrapping your head around the idea that it could quite easily be at least 18 months to 2 years before you could even think about picking up a newspaper, it becomes a lot easier. The grammar is (at least to an intermediate level) relatively similar to English. There are few complicated particles, verbs don’t conjugate, there are no different levels of politeness – there are no hidden traps.
I started studying Japanese at the end of last year so I guess I can say I’ve been studying it on and off for about 9 months now – it’s therefore no surprise that it’s my weakest language. Considering my background in Chinese and Korean, Japanese is coming relatively easily to me. Considered by many as ‘almost impossible’ for native English speakers, I couldn’t disagree more.
Japanese is hard. It has the craziness of Korean grammar combined with the madness of Chinese of characters. As if that wasn’t enough to confuse me, Japanese sounds very similar to Korean but is rarely the same. The Kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) are similar to Chinese characters but are not the same (i.e library = 図書館 (Jap) and 图书馆(Simp. Chi)/圖書館 (Trad. Chi).). For those reasons, you could argue that Japan is therefore the most difficult. Oh- and Japanese also has two alphabets, I forgot that bit, didn’t I!
It’s for those exact reasons that it’s also one of the easiest. A lot of Japanese words are taken from English, Japanese is very well structured (things stick to the rules with few exceptions) and like Korean, many words have similar roots.
In conclusion, there is no short answer. For me, it is purely a matter of perspective. If I constantly tell you that Chinese is the hardest language, that it’s really difficult and learning it is like trying to climb Mt.Everest in a snowstorm (=doomed to fail) then you’re going to think like that, focus only on the negative and inevitably give up.
Take any 5-year old around the world and he or she will have no problems chatting away in their native tongue. The language itself is not inherently difficult.
It’s for that reason that I choose not to focus on which language is hardest. The only thing that makes a language difficult is our attitude and admittedly (to some degree) how learning our native language has tweaked our approach to learning language.
I choose which languages to study based on interest and passion. Choosing a language out of some perceived expectation of greater job prospects or cool points because you’re the ‘only person in the room who speaks Korean’ is fine…but don’t expect much success. Only curiosity and determination can outstrip the mental and time demands of learning a language.
I can’t tell you which language to study. Once you decide on a language I can point you towards all sorts of fantastic resources but it is you who must make the first commitment to learning a language.
