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It took me far longer than it should have to arrive in Korea.   I had met my wife at the end of 2000, and we were married in 2001.  It wasn’t until 2006 that i finally got there.  As well as the relationship that I began with my wife, so too began a slow and frequently frustrating relationship with the Korean language.

Yes, Korean is hard.  What’s not immediately obvious to the western learner of Korean is just how much harder. Research indicates that it’s going to take the average western learner of Korean about four times as long to learn the language as it would for them to learn ’simpler’ languages.   Without knowing this, many learners get frustrated with their lack of progress, and give up.

It’s hard for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it’s hard for intrinsic reasons – the lack of “stickiness” in vocabulary, the heavily contextual nature of the language, sound changes, particles and multiple level of honorifics.  But relative to Chinese and Korean, which are also considered to be of a similar difficulty, there is a dearth of good resources available to the western learner.  While this is slowly improving, we’re still a long way off having any resource that provides all of the things needed for an english-speaking learner.  For now, Korean learners are still left envious at the wall of Japanese and Chinese texts sitting alongside the measly Korean selection.

On the plus side for the visitor to Korea (and learner of Korean), there’s a beautiful gift in the form of it’s simple, well-designed alphabet, commonly written ‘Hangul’, but more correctly romanised (for now – the official romanisation system changes frequently -) as ‘Hangeul’.  In the words of it’s inventor King Sejong, even the simplest of his subjects should be able to learn Hangul in a week.   Which means so can you.  And so should you, if you’re planning a trip to Korea.

Taking a weekend to learn Hangul prior to arriving will really make things a lot less confusing.  While subways and roads are well marked in Roman script, if you learn Hangul you’ll be able to read menus, catch buses and take satisfaction in identifying the many English loan words written on signs everywhere.

Here’s one to start practicing – More in the gallery at the end:

You can probably guess what the main Hangul here says

You’ll also find there are a lot of signs written in both English and Korean, so if you take the time to read the Hangul, you’ll pick up quite a few Korean words:

Seoul subway sign, line 2

One thing that my Korean study hadn’t prepared me for at all is the amount of Korean written vertically.  It seems to be a completely separate skill to reading horizontally.  And you’ll need it if you’re trying to read the 50 different stops written on the side of an express bus:

Pizza Hut

Now try and practice some more reading in the gallery below -