Hi, I want to learn Korean; speaking, writing, and reading it pretty good but fluently later and I was wondering how long will it take me if I try to self teach myself? I’m not Korean of course but I am asian. I probably wont have too much time because I’m going to college right now but I can probably dedicate a few hours a day or a week.
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it takes you a year
reading will take you 3 hours.
Writing will maybe take you 6 hours.
However, speaking and listening may take longer, I’d say you can pick up basic conversational skills in 6 months if you really immerse yourself into the culture.
If you have a Koreatown, visit and practice your chops; they’d love to hear a lick of it from a non-Korean!
EDIT: Hangul is considered the easiest alphabet to learn mainly because it’s scientific and practical. Unlike Japanese and Chinese characters, Korean is phonetic which means each symbol is a specific sound. The King who created Hangul said ‘a wise man can learn Hangul in 1 hour, a fool can learn it in 1 week.’ Therefore, if you sit down and study, You can read and write before you know it, especially if you compare it to the English alphabet, which is far more difficult to learn if it’s a new language.
Honestly, never. If you take classes and study it you’ll be conversationally passable in about 3 years or more. If you go live in Korea and you apply yourself you should be fluent in a few years.
Some people are just naturally faster at learning languages than others for whatever reason. i know people who have diligently studied languages for years and can barely handle the basics. then you hear about people who can learn any number of languages with no problems.
I also think that if you are in a situation where you HAVE to learn a language, then you will be able to learn it quickly. a person living in Korea will probably be able to learn Korean faster than someone living in, let’s say, Kansas, as long as you actually move outside of the english speaking foreigner circle and actually talk to people who either can’t or won’t speak english with you.
It depends on a lot of things, too. How similar the language is to your native tongue, how many languages you’ve already learned, your affinity for language learning. I achieved Japanese fluency in two years, and passed their hardest proficiency test (JLPT1) in only one year. If you ask me, the best thing you can do when learning a language as different from your native tongue as Korean is to study and practice a lot. Memorizing the vocabulary just flat takes time, but grammar, word choice, and syntax can be learned as fast as you study and practice, and those are what are fundamental to fluency. It’s why it’s so much easier for an American to learn and start speaking Spanish than Japanese – both require new vocabulary, but Japanese (which is like Korean with different words) requires utterly different grammar, word choice, and syntax.
It might also help to define what you consider fluency. If you manage to master the fundamental elements of the language, fluency becomes just a question of topics. If I know 200 words about the zoo, I can fluently converse about the zoo because vocabulary at that point is just plug-and-play. Oppositely, even in English I’m not fluent in a topic about chemistry reagents and enzymes, even though I understand English grammar and syntax.
Also, to a certain degree, time is a tool. I think the seven-year rule comes from two ESL studies that showed that it took 6.5 years for college-level non-natives to achieve native-level vocabulary (~20,000 words). I also think that you can only study so much vocabulary a day before your efficacy starts to decrease, at least in my experience. However, there are also hardcore 8-week immersion courses that are designed to improve your competency stupid-fast. And they do it by utterly surrounding students in the language – they study a bunch of different things (so your mind doesn’t lock up) and present material in a lot of different contexts (the average student has to see a word or grammar construct 7 times before he’s able to use it effectively, the average AP student 2-3).
And if you ask the US government, it’s not a question of years. It’s a question of weeks. They train their soldiers to functioning fluency (which would if anything only leave out vocabulary) in Korean in 60 weeks, 4-5 class hours and 2-3 class-prep hours a day.
So based on this and my experience, I’d say it ultimately depends on you, but also that time is exponentially valuable. If you are college-level and study for 2-3 hours a day, it may take 7 years. Yet if you study 8-12 hours a day, you can reach amazing levels in a couple months. Or, if you’re just army-level with an affinity for language, you can achieve fluency in about a year. But you have to know yourself because not everyone has the mental endurance to devote that much time to studying something. You bet your ass a soldier is going to have a lot of discipline, and use that willpower to study (effectively) 8 hours a day for an entire year. If it’s just 8 weeks, and the person does it during a home-stay program, he may have the stress-relief available to study 12 hours a day. But realize that at some point, everyone burns out and becomes less effective at learning. Once you know where your point is, you know how to effectively utilize your time, and you know from where to start working on your mental endurance.
So all of that to say, I don’t really know how to answer your question – kkk! There’s no way to judge “fluency” or how long it will take you to get there, since everyone is different. But keep studying, and keep going, and you will get there. Especially if you can find a situation where you NEED to use Korean, even if it’s just finding someone online to chat with that can’t or won’t speak English with you.
I think that if you go to a standard 20-hour-a-week university program in Korea like the one at Yonsei or Sogang, you’ll be intermediate-low after a little over six months and advanced-low after 1.5 to 2 years of intensive in-country study.
Fluency (and I mean true fluency, not just some guy who says “I’m fluent” because he can have a decent conversation) will take many, many years. I don’t think it’s possible to reach fluency in the classroom. The few people who become fluent usually have jobs that expose them to Korean 40 or more hours a week (NOT English teachers — English teaching is THE worst job in Korea if you want to learn Korean).
I *mostly* agree with Falcon. However, I want to point out the following thing:
US soldiers who learn Korean at DLI (Defense Language Institute) are not fluent, at least not by my definition of the word. I watched some of these soldiers place into Level 2 at Yonsei. Some of them didn’t even know simple pronunciation rules like nasalization, and I knew one DLI graduate who didn’t know the difference between e and eseo (to and from). The DLI program is so much, so fast, the soldiers have a broad but extremely rough understanding of the language, and often lack in terms of everyday vocabulary (though their understanding of news and military matters is comparatively higher to other learners).
Korean takes FOREVER to master. Trust me. I have been learning it for over four years, including three years of my adult life in Korea. I graduated from Yonsei University Korean Language Institute. The problem is that you have to master literally tens of thousands of Chinese-derived vocabulary words and native Korean words to understand 95%+. I know about 6,000 words personally, and in many newspaper articles in the Joseon Ilbo, that’s only like 80% comprehension. Pretty piss poor. It’s only enough to read easy newspapers like Morning Revolution without a dictionary — anything harder than No Cut News, Morning Revolution, or *MAYBE* Hankyoreh, and I need a dictionary.
I have had about 1,400 hours of classroom Korean, lived with Koreans, worked in non-English-teaching jobs in Korea, and had numerous Korean-only girlfriends. However, the sum of all my work was a mere KLPT Level 5 (advanced-low, 6,000 words, thereabouts).
What I’m saying is that Korean is a killer language in terms of difficulty and people who weren’t raised around it are 99% likely never to become fluent. The only way to become fluent is to live in Korea for many years (Falcon said seven, and that’s a good estimate), and know about 20,000 vocabulary words (I’d say it’s 25,000+, but Falcon was in the right ballpark).
Not only do you need to know words, but there are so many nuances and collocations you can only learn through exposure. I frequently have the problem where I watch a TV show and understand relatively little, but look at Korean captions and realize I knew all the words, just couldn’t understand them when they were spoken. Korean is a bitch to comprehend if you weren’t brought up around it.
If you want to turbo-charge your Korean, move to Korea, study it intensively, get a job that puts you in a Korean office (NOT English teaching), cram ten words a day for the next five years, and then maybe you’ll be fluent. You must be very extroverted. I am an introverted guy, and know full well that this hampered my progress beyond a certain point.