I've Finally Made Real Progress in Korean

a year and a half in

About a year and a half into my efforts, I’m ready to share a little bit about my efforts to learn the Korean language. Speaking as someone with professional experience in second-language assessment, I would estimate that I’m about at a B1 level in the CEFR system, maybe a little lower. I’m still too shy to attempt conversation with people other than my girlfriend, and my speaking is often stilted, but I’m getting more and more confident over time and I regularly order in Korean at restaurants. My translation and reading skills have improved rapidly. My girlfriend and I will often have “Korean only” evenings in which we can only speak in the Korean language. I need more time, more practice, and more classes, but I’m feeling good. Which wasn’t always the case! There have been several times when I really felt like my progress had stalled and that I’d never improve. Learning another language is hard, and according to the Foreign Service Institute of the United States State Department, Korean is in the highest difficulty level for native speakers of English, Category IV. And I’m a long way away from feeling confident enough to really go in-depth with a stranger. But after a period of considering giving up, I’m learning faster and with less stress lately, and it’s a good feeling.

In classes I’ve often been the guy who knows a lot of obscure vocabulary or grammar points but who struggles to speak as fluidly as the rest of the class, so my point of emphasis moving forward is obvious.

There are many reasons why I can’t title this post something as snappy as “Yes, You Can Learn Another Language!” The most obvious is that I haven’t really learned another language yet myself. Besides, I started learning Korean because I wanted to share the language with my girlfriend, for whom Korean is a native language. This provides me with both organic motivation and the invaluable resource of someone to talk to, check my pronunciation, and answer my endless questions. Beyond that, while there are many free resources available, it’s true that between classes, books, and apps it’s cost me something like $2000 so far to do this, and not everyone has that to spend. I also have a flexible schedule which allows me to make Korean practice a part of my daily routine. I understand that there are practical reasons why many people can’t follow the path I’m following in studying another language.

However!

I think a lot of people have convinced themselves that they just can’t learn another language. There’s a lot of folk wisdom out there that suggests that adults can’t learn a foreign language, or that they can’t learn one without immersion. (That is, without living in a country where that language is spoken.) And both my personal experience and research tell me that this is wrong. It’s perfectly possible to acquire a functional grasp of another language if you put in the time and effort. Whatever the truth may be about the critical period hypothesis, I think that the idea has become a free-floating reason for people not to try to learn a language when they in fact could, and would find their lives enriched by doing so. My advice is that if you’re interested in learning another language, stop worrying about (quite contentious and unresolved) abstractions about neurological predispositions, get working, and try your best to develop foreign language skills as best you can. I’m confident you can learn enough for it to be practically useful to you. In general I feel like there’s a lot of overthinking going on in regards to second language learning.

Part of the problem is the obsession with fluency. I will also say upfront that, while I intend to keep getting better, I’m sure I’ll never achieve fluency by anyone’s metrics. I just don’t particularly care; fluency is a moving target that’s typically in the eye of the beholder, and anyway my goal is not to speak Korean like a native speaker. My goal is to be able to engage in effective communication in the Korean language, to make myself understood and be able to navigate in Korean language spaces, and to have the skills and confidence necessary to fill in the gaps when I encounter them. I’m on my way to doing that, and as slow going as it’s been, it feels great. So who cares about fluency? It’s a construct that simply isn’t important to me. My advice is that, if you’re interested in learning another language, decide that it’s something you really want to commit to. Then don’t get hung up on the eventual ceiling for your abilities and just dive in. Now here’s a bit about my own particular path.

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Korean is a difficult language for an English speaker to learn. Although there are a lot of borrowed terms from English (as much as 5% of all Korean vocabulary comes from other languages), the sounds are often quite foreign, the grammar is very different, and native Koreans speak at a pace that’s hard for language learners to parse. Korean is an SOV language (subject, object, verb), where English is an SVO language (subject, verb, object) - hence 남자가 (the man+subject marker) 그릇을 (the bowl+object marker) 들었어요 (picked up+past tense+요 politeness level), as opposed to “the man picked up the bowl.” You’ll notice that in English, subject/object distinctions are designated by position within the sentence (with the main exception of personal pronouns) while in Korean that designation comes from enunciated particle differences. Also, in English, politeness/familiarity/relative position information is mostly a matter of context, connotation, inflection, and relationship, whereas Korean has many features specifically designating manners/deference.

However, the Korean alphabet, hangeul, is famously intuitive and easy to learn. You can do so without great stress in a single afternoon. Hangeul was developed by a Korean king as part of an effort to further define national character; prior to its invention, modified Chinese characters were used in Korean language. Hangeul has a number of features that make it logical and simple to learn. For example, consider the following vowels:

아 (ah) 어 (uh) 오 (oh) 우 (oo)

Now consider these vowel sounds.

야 (yah) 여 (yuh) 요 (yoh) 유 (yoo)

As you can see, in each case the addition of a “y” beginning consonant sound is accomplished by doubling a line in the original vowel. This is the kind of feature that’s common to hangeul and which makes it so easy to learn. You’ll also notice that each of these vowels begins with a ㅇ character. That’s because hangeul is arranged into syllable blocks of two to four characters, and it’s against the rules for a vowel to begin a syllable block; the ㅇ is a silent placeholder. The arrangement of syllable blocks is consistent and logical based on the vowel type, with specific construction based on horizontal and vertical vowels.

아 - vertical two-letter block 은 - horizontal three-letter block 읽 - four-letter block

Unlike Chinese and some Japanese characters, hangeul is an alphabet, not logographic - that is, there aren’t specific characters for specific words. This has the advantage of requiring vastly less memorization than is common to learning Japanese and Chinese languages and dialects. The one complication with hangeul is 받침, which refers to the use of final consonants; in some contexts, the last consonants in a syllable block will have a different sound than if the consonant appeared elsewhere, and the immediately following letter can dictate the sound. (For example, that ㅇ silent placeholder becomes the -ng sound when found at the end of a syllable block.) It can be tricky, but you pick it up over time. And outside of 받침, hangeul is a consistently phonetic alphabet.

Still, it has been difficult. Here are some things that make Korean challenging.

• There are vowel sounds that are distinct when enunciated clearly but can be difficult for a language learner to distinguish at speed - 어 (uh), 우 (oo), and 으 (eu) particularly.

• Similarly, there are consonant sounds that are distinct to native speakers but can be quite hard for language learners to catch. Many related sounds are expressed with three Korean letters that are both orthographically and phonetically similar, such as with ㄱ,ㄲ, andㅋ. Consider the difference between 발 (foot) and 팔 (arm). As is often the difference between consonant sounds in Korean, this contrast comes down to the degree of aspiration. It’s common for Korean teachers to have students pronounce consonants with a piece of paper dangled in front of their mouths so that they can see how much the paper moves and thus the difference in sound/meaning. These distinctions can be learned but I find them difficult to produce or recognize at speed.

• Korean is what’s called an agglutinative language, meaning that most of its grammatical information is found in the form of suffixes that denote information like topic/subject/object, plurality, prepositions, and more. It’s a system that’s often remarkably elegant and adaptable. For example, the particle 만 can mean “only,” and can be moved around a sentence to attach to different terms; you can say “Only I eat pizza in the morning,” “I only eat pizza in the morning,” or “I only eat pizza in the morning,” depending on the placement of 만. But the elegance and flexibility can also create considerable complexity, such as when figuring out which order various suffixes go in when attaching them to the root - not a problem when translating someone else’s speech, generally, but quite tricky when producing your own. Something like “부모님께서는” ( a variation of “my parents”) is a simple translation but contains a lot of linguistic information.

• As is true of all languages, homophones are common - a similar sound to 만 can be found in a word for “much” or “many,” in the verb “to meet,” in a particle that means “but” or “however,” etc.

• A great deal of Korean communication is contextual, particularly given that subjects are often optional - while there are specific ways to say “I eat rice,” “you eat rice,” “s/he eats rice,” in actual conversational situations these might be said in the exact same form, differing only in intonation and context. Similarly, unless plurality is specifically the point of a sentence, the plural marker is often omitted for plural nouns. “나는 고양이들이 좋아해요” means “I like cats,” but you’re much more likely to hear “나는 고양이를 좋아해요,” which can be either “I like a/the cat” or “I like cats,” even though it lacks the plural particle. You tell through context. Such casual elisions are very common in native language use but can make language learning difficult.

• There’s two numeral systems, Sino numbers and native/pure Korean numbers. Learning both isn’t that hard, although the native Korean numbers are a little less systematic in how they build larger numbers and thus are trickier. The harder part is knowing when to use which system. Native speakers find when to use one or the other intuitive, but it’s a lot harder for a language learner. The distinctions sometimes seem arbitrary; for example, when giving the time of day the hours digit is read in native numbers while the minutes digit is read in Sino numbers.

• Korean language is deeply influenced by questions of etiquette, manners, and relative station. One way this is expressed is through various language forms based on the level of formality. At the bottom of the formality scale, there’s 반말, the most casual form, which is only used between people with close relationships. There’s also 요 (yo) form and 입니다 (imnida) form; the honorific form (세요) that is likely to be used when speaking to your elders or parents; business-specific constructions; and the royal court language. Again, native speakers typically find it very intuitive and easy to switch between these various forms, but knowing how to conjugate into them and in which situations can be difficult for language learners.

• The topic/subject marker distinction, denoted by 윽/는 for topics and 이/가 for subjects, can be notoriously hard to parse. A common rule of thumb is that the topic particle is used when drawing a contrast, but there are many scenarios where this is not the case, such as in simple declarative sentences about the self like 저는 빵을 먹어요 (I eat bread).

• Like all languages, Korean has quirks. For example, the question “how do you say ‘you’ in Korean?” has a famously complicated answer; there’s at least ten different ways that you might say “you.” As is true of almost everything in Korean, the answer is bound up in matters of etiquette, relative station, and familiarity, which requires social knowledge as well as linguistic.

Still, the challenge makes it fun.

Here are the resources that I turned to. This is all pretty Korean-specific, but unless you’re choosing an obscure language you should be able to find equivalent resources. I stress that this is not the only or best way to do it, but rather just the idiosyncratic way I have pulled a curriculum together. My general strategy has been to flood the zone - use a lot of different resources in different forms, in order to stave off boredom and approach the language from different angles. Again, this is partially about my freedom to set my own schedule, and I’m sure a lot of my time was/is used inefficiently. For me, a big part of my recent growth has been just feeling like more and more is familiar to me, and finding that stuff that was hard is now much easier. For example, while I still may stutter reading hangeul out loud, reading it in my head is very fluid at this point.

Zoom classes. My classes are hosted through the Korea Society, which I chose simply because I found them with a Google search and they were starting fairly shortly thereafter. You can find similar institutions for many major languages, and I’m told Chinese classes can be quite cheap since the Chinese government subsidizes them. However there are also plenty of for-profit online language schools that you can access instead. If I wasn’t an existentially lazy person I would have looked at reviews and stuff before I chose a class. My classes have typically run in the range of 12 weeks, one hour and forty-five minutes class a week, I believe. There’s light homework that involves writing hangeul in our notebooks or textbook and recording our pronunciations online, which the teacher then reviews. I have been pleased to find that the classes are rigorous and move fairly quickly. There hasn’t been a ton of in-class conversation, but I’ve signed up for a specifically conversational class this coming term.

At ~$400 a pop the classes have easily been the most expensive part of this for me, but also essential. For one small thing, while I’m intrinsically motivated and enjoy the process a great deal, it doesn’t hurt to plunk down some cash upfront that I wouldn’t want to waste. More to the point, though, I need human accountability, some other person who I wouldn’t want to fail. Having a teacher really helps with that. Simply learning through apps and books on my own wouldn’t have instilled the same sense of personal responsibility.

Textbooks. I have used two primary sets of texts, Korean Made Simple from GO! Billy Korean and the Active Korean series from Two Ponds Books.

The former I chose simply because it comes highly recommended in many places; the author is a non-native speaker who has a popular Korean-language YouTube and teaches professionally. The latter, developed by the Language Education Institute of Seoul National University, have been the assigned textbooks for my classes and appear to be commonly used in many courses. The content is not particularly different, but the approaches to how they’re laid out are distinct, which I find helpful. On the other hand, GO! Billy Korean primarily uses the 입니다 form, and Active Korean the 요 form, which has been tricky. As stated above, learning hangeul was essential, and both helped to do so, as well as presenting some vocabulary that I may not have picked up otherwise. I would have been pretty at sea with just a book, as far as natural language sounds go, but I very much appreciated the structure the books afforded me and the ability to work fully at my own pace. Active Korean books also include CDs that are useful for hearing sounds, although were I not the kind of dweeb who owns a stereo system I would have no way to play them. I believe I’ve paid about ~$250 combined for the four textbooks I’ve bought.

Reading books. As distinct from textbooks that contain grammar information and related, these are books that include longer texts for reading.

Olly Richards is a popular polyglot who has a prominent YouTube channel; he’s a big advocate for reading as a key means of language acquisition. The advantages are obvious in that you can read as much as you understand, note vocabulary or constructions you don’t know, check the meanings later, and slowly work your way through content. This is in contrast to classes and podcasts and apps, all of which move at their own pace - which will frequently be faster than you’d prefer. I’ve found this form of learning to be useful, though I’m still working on getting comfortable. The latter book, Korean Stories for Language Learners, is cool, but most of the stories are still beyond me. Reading books is really good for absorbing vocabulary and for removing some of the stress of immediately producing language, but for that same reason isn’t very helpful at developing more fluid and automatic production.

Apps. I downloaded the free Naver Papago app; it’s a translation app that includes many languages that was developed by a Korean company and is generally believed to have more accurate translations for the language than Google’s app. I rarely ever use it to do actual translating - that’s my job as a learner - but it’s useful to have the ability to look up a given word or phrase on demand. (As always, I find it very important to read the hangeul along with hearing the sounds, to really absorb what I’m hearing; the first tip everyone gives you is to ditch romanization.) I also have used the Rosetta Stone app a great deal, which I find useful for introducing a structured progression system, as well as much better than the old CD version for French I had 15 years ago. I wouldn’t want it to be my only way to learn, but it’s a great supplement, albeit an expensive one. I have also used Quizlet and Kahoot for flashcards and practice. I used Duolingo for a period of time, but I didn’t get very much out of their model. (They also have a frustrating tendency to teach you the Konglish alternatives for common nouns when I’d much rather learn the native Korean word.) Apps are good for sneaking a little learning into the random moments of the day.

Videos and podcasts. I’ve used a grab-bag approach here and didn’t study any particular channel seriously, instead putting various videos on fairly randomly and typically just pronouncing along. Videos and podcasts have not been a major part of my learning, as they are neither interactive like classes and apps nor move at my own pace, as books do. But they are important for simulating immersion and for marinating in the sounds. I frequently put on Korean podcasts while I exercise, again not as a serious form of study but as a way to simply expose myself to the sounds as frequently as possible. I’ve picked up a few key phrases this way. The channel I turn to most frequently, both on YouTube and for podcasts, has been Talk to Me in Korean, which I understand to be the most popular such channel on YouTube. I also sometimes put the Korean Englishman channel on in the background, and frequently will just pop on videos that appear in my feed from random channels.

Anyway - if you came up to me on the street and tried to challenge me on my Korean skills, I’d probably stammer and choke. I’ve got a lot more work to do. We’re going to Seoul… someday, and I hope to be ready for that experience when it happens. For now it’s enough that I can talk shit about people with my girlfriend in public without anyone else knowing what we’re saying. And it’s honestly been so much fun. If you can commit, I really recommend picking a language and diving in. The beauty of it is that you probably have no artificial deadline you have to hit, there are now good free resources for pretty much any language, and the opportunities to use your skills with real people have never been more plentiful. Why not give it a try?

(Yes I expect you will all come up with corrections, feel free.)