Could have been designed better; either that or Korean has changed significantly since.

Some people find the number of verb endings daunting.

The letters are arranged into syllables, which happen to have a similar arrangement to Chinese characters. Those syllables are not characters themselves.

“Yasumu” isn’t made of “hito” and “ki” because those are the Japanese readings of those components when they are characters themselves. Chinese readings (I could…

I love erhua so much.

Korean is not a tonal language.

Korean has honorific verb endings and infixes. Japanese has honorific verb endings, too. The Japanese system is harder, but the Korean system is more important. You can get away with never using it in Japanese, if you don’t learn the Korean one don’t bother speaking Korean.

“Hispanic” refers to the Spanish language the same way “Anglo” refers to the English language. It distinguishes whatever Spanish speakers you’re talking about from those of Spain exactly as well as “Anglo” distinguishes English-speaking Americans from people from England. (That is to say, it doesn’t.)

I had a Brazilian friend who tried to speak “Portunol” to the new guy in our dorm, who was from Honduras. We only knew he was from Honduras, we knew nothing else about him. After standing there cringing at my my friend’s pathetic attempt to make himself understood in Spanish, he said, in a perfect US accent “Just…

Haha, holy shit can it ever cause offense. I had friends scream at me for using the wrong politeness level.

The fact that it’s still clustered in syllables holds Korean speakers back in learning foreign languages (almost as bad as the Japanese), because they have to get over the hurdle of thinking of all phonemes in terms of Korean syllables.  Most people never get past that.

Chinese speakers pick up English pronunciation…

This is like saying English is easy to learn to read and write because it only has 26 letters.  A billion second language learners would beg to differ.  Japanese has regular orthography.  Korean doesn’t.  

Expect them to get closer to that asymptote.

Korean is harder to write because it has spelling issues almost as bad as English.

Korean is harder to read because it has almost as many homonyms as Japanese, but has nothing to identify which word you’re talking about. (Unless you’re looking at text from like 50+ years ago, or really dense academic text, where they…

Kanji (and Hanzi, and Hanja) are made up of simpler pieces.

Unless you’re hitting a pinata in the rain, no one would ever confuse ame and ame if you stressed it wrong.  

but their grammar is structured differently.

And, even if you managed to get a source of Japanese written only in kana, its super confusing to parse.

It has similar word order. (Even where it’s different, like prepositions, it’s still comprehensible) Other than that, the grammar is mostly based on particles, which correspond to almost nothing in English.

And yeah, I’ve heard that about Cantonese from Mandarin speakers.

You mean proper Beijer putongrhuar?

Most of the populace writes characters on their phones, which is easy to read.  Get with the times, grandpa.  

Yeah, the thing about all those easy-to-understand, almost-completely-regular verb endings is that you can mix and match them, and chain them together, more or less without limit. I start to lose comprehension when a sentence has more than 3 clauses, and keigo is all about chaining as many verb endings and archaic cons…

This is the same ranking system the military uses. And it is, to some degree, bullshit. It doesn’t take 2200 hours for these languages. It takes that many hours if you’re studying them as a full-time job, which is what they do at the Defense Language Institute, and I presume what the state department is doing, too.

Chinese makes up for tones with word order which is sufficiently similar to English that you can go in with just a little vocabulary and understand basic sentences. Where grammar does differ from English, it’s still simpler and more flexible than Japanese.  

Some people find the combination of three writing systems…