What is korean like?

[Alveranter]

I've been planning to study yet another language, and since I don't find japanese that interesting, I've been thinking about korean.. is it worth giving a shot? Does it resemble japanese a lot?

[Quest]

대한민국 지식 정보 문화의 중심 인터넷 영풍문고

엠파스 뉴스- 가장 빠른 뉴스

클릭큐 실시간번역- 세계화의 관문을 열어가는

[Alveranter]

thanks..

[nathanuk88]

I was thinking about the korean language the other day, they have an alphabet (or so a website says) try this:

http://langintro.com/kintro/first.htm

[Lu]

They do, and that's easy enough to learn. I got the impression the rest of the language is terrible, though, very hard grammar, words that are lian zai yiqi, lot of forms of politeness... good luck.

[yonglan]

Korean is in many ways similar to Japanese, or actually vice versa since Japanese *probably* came from Korean -- I will now be assassinated by some right wing yakuza type

Yeah, lots of levels of politeness. What might make it most difficult to learn is so few resources. It's not a commonly learned language, so there aren't the number or quality of books one can find for learning English, Japanese, etc..

I lived there for a year and putzed about with the language a tiny bit. Since your profile says you know about a million languages, it would be easier for you I would guess.

[Alveranter]

yes.. chinese and japanese have really put korean in the shade.. it doesn't make it less interesting though, and as you say, the problem might be finding an adequate book.. attending a korean class could also be an alternative but I doubt such a course would start here in Sweden, the interest not being very high. Some people say japanese and korean are related to finnish (?).. any veracity in that statement..?

[yonglan]

Does Finnish put the verb at the end?

[shibo77]

Finnish is Uralic, Korean is supposedly "Altaic". They are different families. Some people like to put them together into Uralic-Altaic, but even if it is of the same family, it would be of no help to your learning the languages. Altaicd is a theorised group. The other groups like Indo-European is very well established (but a theory also). But Altaic is not very accepted, and very stretchy.

-Shibo

[Bamboo Grove]

The position of the verbs in Finnish is not similar to Korean or Japanese. We have the normal subject+predicate system as for example English. But we do have -ko, -kö added to the verbs to make questions just as Japanese have -ka and Koreans -kka