I took Korean for 3 years, although I’ve forgotten most of it. Korean is a really difficult language to understand and speak, even though its writing system (hangul) is a phonetic alphabet which you can learn quickly. And technically pretty much everything is pronounced like it’s written, although Korean has sounds English does not have. But it’s one of the most traditional Asian languages and retains all the different nuances about levels of politeness and formality, which is primarily reflected in the verbs (and some of the nouns as well). Someone told me that every Korean verb has 63 possible different forms depending on who you are talking to or about (whether higher, equal or lower than you in status). There are something like 4 or 5 different levels of speech (although foreigners basically only need to learn 2), and I’ve been told there is even a different type of speech that is used by the military to speak to each other.
Mandarin Chinese is much easier to speak and understand, it’s very straightforward, although you have to get used to those tones. But of course there you get killed by the Chinese characters you have to know. Now it’s even worse because Mainland China uses “simplified characters” which really aren’t that simplified, and other places still use “traditional characters” (Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and that is what is also used in Japan) so you actually have to learn 2 sets of characters.
I’m so glad that I don’t have to learn the intricacies of Asian hierarchy. I would be accidentally insulting people all day long.
You’re a better man than I am, Charlie Brown. In college, one of my fellow students was taking Mandarin and I was deeply impressed but never had the guts to try. I took Russian when I was a physics student. Switched majors in the middle of my senior year to Ancient Art history and they forced me into French. You cannot imagine the look on the language instructors’ faces when I had to recite. Luckily, U of Chicago was a research school, so I was only expected to read.
I love the sound of Korean. There’s a clarity to the sounds that reminds me a bit of Russian. Chinese has so many slur sounds that I get distracted while reading subtitles. But I absolutely need to hear the sounds, not just for the additional information of the background sounds, but for the emotions in the voices.
I started making up charts to send friends with phonetic spelling of common Chinese words we were hearing, but no one else got excited so I gave up. I did hear the Guardian actors arguing during an interview about the pronunciation of some dialect terms and was suitably overwhelmed by the distinctions that needed to be heard.
There is a movie, similar to the King’s Speech, that describes the creation of the written alphabet.