Why Is Korean So Hard?

[soryang]

Why Is Korean So Hard?
THE KOREA BLOG
By
01/05/2016
By Colin Marshall

The summer after my freshman year of high school, I took a short computer programming class. Getting up to speed in C, the programming language of the day, looked like a daunting task, but the instructor reassured us: “Look, guys, I don’t expect you to learn C in two weeks any more than I’d expect you to learn Korean in two weeks.” I took his point, but the specific comparison baffled me: sure, great, but who on Earth would choose to learn Korean?
....

I didn’t give a another thought to that programming teacher’s remark until the year after college, as I hung around and plowed through all the Korean movies available at the university media library, eventually starting to suspect I could teach myself a thing or two about their language if I put my mind to it. Some time earlier, I’d learned the one thing about Korean that everyone who knows only one thing about Korean knows: its written language, known as hangul ( 한글 ), is just an alphabet with letters arranged into blocks, not a logographic language like Chinese (or the adapted-from-Chinese characters used in Japanese) which requires a massive amount of memorization even to approach functionality.

Much more:

http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/korean-hard/

This is a nice account of the author's experience trying to master Korean. Colin Marshall writes a lot of reviews concerning Korean movies, books, culture etc., for the LA Review of Books.

[Beakybird]

1. I'll never get the Hyundai Accent! 😉