11-21-2015, 05:27 AM
My wife is Japanese, but lived in Korea for many years and is fluent in Korean. Korean sentence structure is similar to Japanese, as they generally place the verb at the very end of the sentence. In that sense, it's basically easier for Koreans and Japanese to learn each others' languages as compared to westerners trying to learn. I can be very frustrating to have to wait for the speaker to finish the sentence to understand whether what they are talking about already took place or will take place in the future!
Korean written language is basically a phonetic language. However, over the years they've had various attempts to introduce Chinese characters. During the Japanese occupation, students were forced to learn and study in Japanese. More recently, different Korean governments have tried to introduce Chinese characters as a system of reading. So, there are generations who might have gone to school in the 1960s or 80s who can read a Korean version of Chinese characters, while those who studied in the 70s and 90s (for example) can only read the phonetic characters. Korea is an interesting mess! They have experienced rapid growth, but came from a much poorer recent history than Japan as well as other mitigating factors, so development has been much more spotty.
Korean written language is basically a phonetic language. However, over the years they've had various attempts to introduce Chinese characters. During the Japanese occupation, students were forced to learn and study in Japanese. More recently, different Korean governments have tried to introduce Chinese characters as a system of reading. So, there are generations who might have gone to school in the 1960s or 80s who can read a Korean version of Chinese characters, while those who studied in the 70s and 90s (for example) can only read the phonetic characters. Korea is an interesting mess! They have experienced rapid growth, but came from a much poorer recent history than Japan as well as other mitigating factors, so development has been much more spotty.