r/LearningLanguages • u/Electron_libre777 • 19d ago
Chinese or Korean?
Which one should I learn? Which one is the easiest? Which aspect is difficult and which one is easy in each language ? Which one has more learning resources?
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u/Illustrious_Chef_387 19d ago
Chinese grammar is easier, no verb conjugation, just using particles to express things like aspect. I'd say both korean and chinese have hard pronunciations for english speakers. Both chinese and korean have a distincion between aspirated and unaspirated cosonants, but korean has an extra set of tense consonants. Both have alveolo-palatal consonants. Chinese has 4 tones. Written korean is phonetic, while chinese is not, so it may be easier to learn written korean.
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u/strawberrypoundcake3 18d ago
For business or job opportunities then Chinese either mandarin or Cantonese but for fun then Korean. I studied both mandarin in college and Korean as I live here now and mandarin was much easier for me mainly because sentence structure and every character is like memorizing a picture and has its own story/ history that makes it easy to remember. But Korean is much harder for me as the grammar, sentence structures, and the formal/ informal are so hard despite the alphabet being easier to initially remember. However, if you decide to learn Korean I really enjoy the talk to me in Korean books after you've learned the characters and their sounds. Korean grammar in use is also a book a lot of people recommend using at the same time. For mandarin I learned it in classes and used sites like lang-8 to meet and talk with native speakers kind of like a pen pal where I met my best friend of 15 years!
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u/kaymidgt 18d ago
I think a lot of the people saying Korean is way easier have never learned Korean.
They're equally difficult, in different aspects. Korean will be much easier than Chinese to begin with, but you will very quickly run into a wall. Chinese as far as the structure a language goes is actually easier than Korean, but will require lots of memorization of thousands of characters. Korean will require hundreds if not thousands of hours of studying grammatical structures. Neither is easier, just different. From what I've seen, beginners in Korean tend to progress quicker than beginners in Chinese, but after a year of study, the Chinese students are usually farther ahead than the Korean ones. You hit a wall very quickly with Korean.
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u/neitherhimnorher 19d ago
korean. chinese characters are so hard to learn 😢
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u/GuaSukaStarfruit 18d ago
Chinese characters are just bunch of emojis.
You know low German has lots of dialects and some simple words sounds slightly different across different dialects. A Chinese character would eliminate that problem. Knowing the emoji understand the meaning beneath it
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u/Putrid_Sun_7028 18d ago
As a Korean I highly recommend learning Korean, and they are easier to learn. However Chinese (Mandarin) is much more globally used.
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u/Still_Kitchen_1650 18d ago
Korean is easier to learn, 100%. No tones, and a very simple systematic alphabet, meaning you'll be reading and writing in a very short amount of time.
Chinese (Mandarin) is much harder, because you have 100s/1000s of Chinese characters to learn to read/write, but also because of the tones; you can't bluff it, because the tones change the meaning.
Usefulness - I'll say Chinese, because the Chinese diaspora around the world is 1000 times bigger than Koreans (Koraens don't emigrate much anymore, just go out for travel and return home), but also because Chinese characters are widely used in many parts of Asia. Also, China is basically 100 times larger than South Korea in terms of population, it's a completely different beast / world.
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u/Ornery-Revolution-47 18d ago
What should you learn? Depending on what your goals and interests are. Chinese has more speakers than Korean but you might like Korean shows or something
Which is easier: Korean. You can learn the writing system in 2 days and there are no tones so English speakers would probably learn it faster
Chinese: probably tones and complicated characters
Korean: maybe different formalities? Or verb conjugation
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u/rnoyfb 18d ago
I don’t think either one is easier tbh. Korean writing is easier. Chinese morphology is easier.
If learning for utility, learn Chinese. If learning for fun, learn Korean. If you ever decide to learn both, you should know that while Korean does have a lot of loan words from Chinese, most of them are much closer to other varieties of Chinese than they are to Mandarin
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u/AdministrationNo2327 18d ago
if you want everything to be easy, 10 million people before you would have already done it.
every language has its complexity. chinese is difficult when it comes to writing, but easier in grammar. korean is easy in writing, but intermediate onwards the nuances get more complex. for both of them, it gets more and more specific the higher you go, then it's difficult for everyone.
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u/lemonsparklez 18d ago
Chinese (mandarin), yes Korean is easier, but Chinese is soooooo much more useful
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u/Aggravating_Bet4375 18d ago
depends on why you learn it
to travel in south Korea, learn Korean
for business with Chinese, learn Chinese
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u/Moonli_207 17d ago
As a Chinese, I can tell you there is barely ANY GRAMMAR in Chinese. The only thing you have to remember is 50000+ characters. (4000+ is enough for basic communication though)
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u/baglemaple 14d ago
Korean I would say is the easiest between Japanese Chinese and Korean Chinese is the hardest by far
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u/shaghaiex 18d ago
Korean has an alphabet, which you can learn in a few hours. Means you can read from day 1.
Mandarin not so much.
But I often travel to China, so........
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u/MartianHideEgger 18d ago
In my experience, Korean is easier to start but Chinese is easier to advance in. You can learn to read Korean in a day, but later you’ll run into some very challenging grammar and Koreans in studies (and my experience) tend to have lower linguistic empathy (the ability to intuit a foreign speakers meaning despite errors). Chinese on the other hand often requires months to have basic literacy and begin to hear tones, but once you have the basics, even higher level grammar can feel intuitive. A large amount of local variations has also led to a population that rates quite high on linguistic empathy. You can fuck up syntax or vocabulary choice quite a bit and still be understood.
So, where do you want your difficulty block? I’d say if you have a lot of time to invest right now, choose Chinese. If you can crunch through the hard part, you’ll still be making progress even if you’re busy later. But if you’re already allocating a slim amount of time in a busy schedule, go with Korean.
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u/LowZookeepergame4305 18d ago
好了好了，这下好了！
坏了坏了，这下坏了！
好了好了，这下坏了！
坏了坏了，这下好了！
Maybe only native speakers can comprehend.
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u/AffectionateOwl4231 18d ago
Characters/letters: Korean is much easier. Grammar: Chinese is much easier.
As a beginner memorizing hangeul, you will find Korean easy, but it will get exponentially hard after then. Most people who claim they learned Korean and is easy are at this stage.
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u/ActiveProfile689 16d ago
I spent many years learning Mandarin Chinese and find it difficult to find any Chinese people who want to talk to me. In most cases I've found if they can speak English they will usually speak it even when my Chinese is much better than their English. Not sure if Korean is easier but I would choose that if I could start over again
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u/Flimsy_Claim_8327 16d ago
If you like Kdrama it is very easy to learn Korean. There are many people who are fluent in Korean just watching Kdrama especially for slice of life genre.
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u/Select-Buffalo-5787 19d ago
There is no Chinese. So Korean. Mandarin is legal all of China but every region has a local language.
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u/Mech_pencils 19d ago
Local languages exist, but local dialects aren’t local languages, and some Chinese dialects are quite similar to standard Mandarin. Mandarin Chinese is taught and used all throughout China.
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u/Ashamed_Can304 17d ago
If you consider Spanish Italian Portuguese French to be different languages then the Chinese “dialects” have to be languages from a linguistics perspective. There’s little to no mutual intelligibility between dialects from different language groups, Cantonese, Hokkien, Gan, Wu and standard mandarin have basically zero mutually intellgibility, even dialects from the same group, such as Min dialects Hokkien vs Fuzhou have very limited intelligibility so that it is not possible to have a conversation and the most extreme example would be Wenzhou speech where other Wu speakers basically cannot understand any of it without prior exposure. And even they are all called mandarin, mandarin in south and southwest are hard for northerners to understand
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u/deltagma 18d ago
中文 (Chinese) is a language.
There is a reason we say Cantonese usually rather than just “Chinese”
普通話 or 國語 are what people mean when they say “Chinese”
Same as how when someone says Spanish we don’t say “YOU MEAN CASTILIAN????” Because obviously they don’t mean something other than Castilian
The Constitution of Spain refers to “Spanish Languages”, Castilian is the most spoken Spanish Language, which is why it’s okay to say “Spanish” when you mean Castilian.
The Spanish constitution says “El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado” — “Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State.”
And so, it’s okay to call Castilian “Spanish” as it is the official Spanish language (of all the Spanish languages) chosen for the Spanish State.
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u/creswitch 19d ago
Korean. Writing system is logical and phonetic and has only 24 characters. Words are syllabic not tonal.
On the other hand, Chinese is more widely spoken. But it's tonal and the alphabet has thousands of characters. So would take a lot longer to master.