How hard the Korean alphabet is: 2/5, “Pretty easy” What does this rating of “moderately difficult” mean in reality? It means that if you are planning on getting very far in learning Korean in a year or so, an average learner should dedicate around two to four hours a day every day to studying it intensely, with at least a few hours of class time a week, plus homework drills. Vocabulary: 5/5 “Very hard” (Note: I have revised this after learning a few thousand words).Grammar: 4/5, “Moderate” (I realised this was harder as time went on).I’m giving it this rating based on assessing: “How hard is Korean” overall: 4/5, or “Moderately Difficult”
How hard Korean vocabulary is: Difficulty 5/5, “Very hard”. How hard Korean pronunciation is: 3/5, “Moderate”. How hard Korean grammar is: 4/5, “Quite hard”, so do lots of drills. How hard the Korean alphabet is: 2/5, “Pretty easy”. “How hard is Korean” overall: 4/5, or “Moderately Difficult”. It’s not a language to learn casually on the side unless you don’t expect to get very far. Note: I’m still learning Korean, and am roughly at the “Intermediate” stage. Despite Korean being fairly early to learn how to read, I’d say Korean is quite hard to learn (a 4/5 in difficulty) - harder to get to fluency for an English speaker than French or German, but easier than Chinese or Arabic.įor each of the below aspects - alphabet, grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary - I rate as on a 1-5 point difficulty scale: “Very easy, Pretty easy, Moderate, Kinda hard, Very hard”. In fact, I’d put it as one of the hardest languages I’ve learned. The short answer: Korean is not too difficult. In the process of studying Korean, I’ve learned a lot about the Korean language, especially a bunch of things I didn’t expect (that I wrote a whole article about - things nobody told me about learning Korean).Īs planning out how much I’d have to study Korean every day to get conversational I began to wonder was: how hard is Korean, really? Specifically for English speakers, and maybe for someone who already knows Chinese? (Which is me, but is also another ~1.5 billion people.) My classes are nearly entirely in Korean (other than if I really get stuck), and I do all everyday things (food, market shopping, hobby classes) in Korean. My level now is “beginner conversational”. I originally wrote this after a few months study, then updated it after a year and now after nearly three years. 
It was originally in preparation for a planned three-month trip to Korea, which happened in late 2022.
In early 2020 I began learning Korean in earnest. This is my answer to the question “How hard is Korean for English speakers?” after three years of learning, including spending time in Korea.
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