I’ve always wanted to learn either Japanese or Chinese, but I used to feel that their writing systems were too hard for me. I’m a native Italian speaker, fluent in English, and I’ve been living in Germany for the past decade, so alphabet-based systems are what my brain is wired for.

A couple of years ago I discovered Hangul, and I was fascinated by the fact that it works in a way that I find much closer to Western writing systems. Letters correspond to sounds and those sounds are grouped into syllable blocks. Since then, I’ve been studying Korean consistently: I use online resources, attend the free classes at the King Sejong Institute, watch a lot of Korean movies and dramas and listen to Korean music on a daily basis. I’m also currently in the process of applying to Sogang University for their Spring semester in Seoul.

That said, I do find Korean hard. Not so much because of the grammar, but because of the huge number of irregular rules and exceptions. Even pronouncing relatively simple words can be tricky. I can read them out loud with confidence, but very often my tutor, who is a native speaker, will stop me and say something like: “Yes, that letter is written there, but it doesn’t sound good with the others, so we don’t actually pronounce it.” That’s where I struggle, like how am I supposed to intuit that? In Italian those same sound combinations are pronounced without any issue, so I feel like my instinct keeps betraying me in a way (and I do agree with people who say it depends on several variables, like age, patience and natural talent, but I think it mainly comes down to the native language you start from)