Learning another language with Japanese

5 comments

1. Korean looks and sounds different enough to me that I don’t think I’d confuse them at all, but YMMV

2. If you really want to, Korean is probably the one language you can probably pull off (if you have Japanese background).

   It is not as easy as going from Korean to Japanese (for Kanji reasons), but I think you might be able pull it off. I do not know if JLPT N3 Level is going to give you that significant of an advantage while learning Korean though.

3. They’re very similar in the same way English is very similar to French: there’s a lot of shared vocabulary which is said and spelt slightly differently, but you’re hardly going to hear French and confuse it with English. Rather than confusing you it’ll give you a huge head start. If you focus solely on Korean you might lose some Japanese if it’s only N3 though, but nothing a little study can’t fix

4. I am fluent in Chinese, around N3 in Japanese, and have studied about a year of Korean off and on.

   Learning Korean will be no problem for you. You will be able to make good progress in three months in the country.

   The Korean phonetic writing system is super simple, you can learn it in a day. Characters are not used as much as in Japanese, but what you know will transfer across fine. Grammar is similar, nothing will be confusing. There are a lot of loan words from Chinese.

5. Not sure about Korean, but I am learning French and Japanese at the same time and it really doesn’t hinder you at all by doing this. Of course your time investment may take a hit, if you’re only studying japanese for 1 hour a day when you usually study for 2 hours a day then obviously you’ll improve at a slower rate. There’s also studies that show that learners of two languages do not experience any negative effects, again as long as you’re studying for the same amount of time you always did.