Korean & Japanese

Having studied both Japanese and Korean for about two years each, I've been asked which one is easier. Although neither one is necessarily "easy" for native English speakers, I think Korean is slightly easier, though that might be because I studied Japanese first.

Each one has its comparatively "easier" parts, though, and I could write pages about the whole thing. But instead of giving you a headache from it all, I'll try to keep it kind of short. Here's the breakdown:

Speaking: Japanese. It has about 20 consonant sounds, but only five vowels sounds, and no vowel blends. There's one tough part, and that's remembering to make those dragged out vowel sounds. Tokyo (東京 too-kyoo), for example, has this kind of elongated long "o" sound.

Korean only has about about 14 consonant sounds, but has about 15 vowel and vowel blends. Among the consonants, there are 10 "voiced" sounds, 5 of which can be "doubled," and 4 "aspirated." It's not as difficult as it sounds, but it's more difficult than Japanese.

Listening: Japanese, for the same reasons. In Korean, I have particular difficulty distinguishing the 으 (eu), 아 (short a), and 어 (au/short o) sounds.

Writing: They're about equal in terms of grammar, since they share so many common structures, but in terms of actual spelling I think Japanese is easier, since the individual sounds are simpler. Korean has this ambiguity with its short "e" 애 and 에 sounds that always messes me up. It's hard to remember which words use which ones where.

Reading: KOREAN. This is where Korean more than makes up the difference. Unlike in Japan, Korea's writing system is designed for Korean. It's also a phonetic language, so you can sound out words based on how they're spelled. It rarely uses Chinese characters, and when they are used, they have only one pronunciation.

Japanese, by comparison, is a graft of three systems. Hiragana is used for native words, while katakana is used for foreign words. They're not too bad -- each character stands for a syllable, and there aren't all that many of them.

The Chinese characters, however, are a nightmare. Each one has at least one native Japanese pronunciation (kunyomi) and and one interpretive Chinese pronunciation (onyomi). Sometimes they're mixed up, too, so for Osaka's two Chinese characters, 大阪, you could come up with four pronunciations if you didn't already know it. (Osaka, Daihan, O-han, or Daisaka) There's just no guessing a word's pronunciation.

Although the use of Chinese characters sometimes allows you to understand a word even if you don't know how it's pronounced, that situation's pretty rare.