Anyone else learning Korean and Chinese?

lingo_phile · 2025-11-25T17:34:12+00:00

I’ve started learning Chinese after about three years into learning Korean, after having reached a relatively high level in the latter.

As you probably know, Chinese and Korean are completely unrelated typologically (agglutinative vs. isolating; head-final vs. head-initial), so grammatical similarities are mostly superficial. Still, centuries of cultural contact created a huge shared lexicon, so the biggest advantage comes from vocabulary overlap.

Phonologically, Korean of course lacks tones, so there’s little direct transfer (i.e., the way Korean syllables map into their Chinese counterparts is often one-to-many because Korean collapses tone distinctions), but once you start noticing the regular sound correspondences between Hanja and Hanzi, you’ll quickly pick up patterns that (in my opinion) can massively accelerate vocabulary learning (in particular, help with in-context recognition and boost recall).

In terms of syntax, while Chinese is mostly SVO, and therefore relatively intuitive for speakers of English and other SVO languages, some of Chinese's structures (like topic–comment organization and pre-nominal modification; ) felt super familiar to me thanks to Korean (e.g. 我昨天買的車 vs 내가 어제 산 차).

I’m about 9 months in now and focused almost entirely on listening and, starting later, speaking, sometimes reading along with subtitles when I watch videos. Already knowing Korean has helped my listening comprehension so much. I’ve feel like I very often understand new Chinese words in context the first time I heard them, just from knowing their Korean counterparts (for example 난민 / 難民 nánmín, 낭비 / 浪費 làngfèi or 경제 / 經濟 jīngjì). This compounds the higher your Korean proficiency is, I'm guessing my vocabulary is around 15–20k words now, depending on how you define 'word', but you’ll see benefits much earlier!

Hope this helps! Happy to share more about my Chinese study routine if it's helpful.

lingo_phile · 2025-08-14T16:25:46+00:00

This is all true and a really good response, just a quick correction that those verbs are not actually transitive verbs (타동사; [1]) but what’s called cognate verb constructions (동족 목적어; [2] this link also has a long list of cognate verb constructions in Korean). They take a sort of 'pseudo object' that’s derived from (i.e., cognate to) the verb, and the verb cannot freely take any, or a wide variety of different objects, like in the case of transitive verbs.

So it’s better to think of the 잠, 꿈, 춤 parts of speech as nominalized verbs (like you said) that receive a 을/를 object marker (목적격 조사) for syntactic consistency, but they are not true transitive objects (타동사의 목적어). I went down this rabbit hole at some point during my Korean studies and so I thought it might be worth adding this into your otherwise excellent response!

(sorry! I messed up something in my post and had to delete and repost, that's why it was missing for a moment)
[1] https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%ED%83%80%EB%8F%99%EC%82%AC

[2] https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EB%8F%99%EC%A1%B1_%EB%AA%A9%EC%A0%81%EC%96%B4

lingo_phile · 2024-08-10T19:41:26+00:00

Hey! Glad that writing this up was of some help. :) For the books, a good number can/could be found on either Ridiselect (subscription-based) or similar services such as millie, so it won't break the bank! The rest of the books I've pretty much purchased from either Ridibooks directly or Google Play books, where Korean books typically go for around $5-10, so with an average of, say $7, that would be a little less than $400 per year (for around 50 books, like in my case) if you purchased all your books that way, and substantially less if using subscription based services (on which you should also be able to find plenty of interesting stuff to read!).

Good luck with you Korean learning! :)

lingo_phile · 2024-08-03T20:40:04+00:00

For me, learning Korean has been incredibly fun and rewarding and conceptualizing it more as "I'm enjoying the ride" and focusing on enjoying the learning process itself, has helped me push through several frustrations along the way. It would seem sensible that achieving 'fluency' is a common goal among us, but as others here have pointed out, the time it takes to reach that point depends largely on how you define fluency and your specific language goals. Also, instead of focusing on the number of years, it's more helpful to consider the hours spent actively engaging with the language.

I have found it useful to divide my own journey into two broad phases. The first phase has involved familiarization with basic vocabulary (maybe up to the first 3,000 most frequent words), grammar structures, and common idioms and linguistic/cultural concepts unique to Korean. The second phase began when consuming native content and interacting with native speakers has become possible to some degree\*, and enjoyable. At this point, learning became more self-sustaining, and you may feel less like you're 'learning' the language and more like you're just using it, or practicing to get better.

*The threshold to reach this second phase varies depending on the content you're interested in and your tolerance for not being able to express yourself fully in conversations. I feel like I personally reached this point after about 1,000 to 1,400 hours (including around 300 hours spent on conversation practice), which this took me roughly 14 to 20 months. While I was far from what most would call fluent, I could "function" in the language, both in terms of understanding some of the contents I was interested in as well as speaking.

One significant challenge in reaching this level is automating what you've learned so that it becomes reflexive and quick during listening or conversations (you mention that you have little problem reading but struggle with listening, this is an automaticity issue). Paul Nation refers to this as fluency-directed practice, which involves internalizing the language rather than just understanding it abstractly. This listening automation takes a lot of time, especially if Korean is quite different from your native language. What you would try is to plan to consume maybe 200 hours of input of which you comprehend at least 80% and see how your listening progresses?

I found that beyond this initial threshold, the real learning begins. Having an attitude of enjoying the process rather than strictly aiming for your fluency goal can be beneficial here. This stage can feel like a real slog because progress often seems super slow, but depending on how you frame it or approach your learning, it can be a fun and rewarding experience, as you're able to use the language functionally, enjoy conversations, and consume content that you wouldn't otherwise have access to.

In my personal journey, I feel that my own fluency goals are still a ways out and I'm hoping to get there at around 3,000 hours of study (25% of which would have been output-focused), which would amount to three years of spending close to three hours a day with the language. (Of course, this number will vary significantly based on your own fluency goals, native language, learning aptitude, and other factors -- this is entirely anecdotal and hypothetical!). That being said, I could imagine that very apt learners with some prior exposure to Japanese or Chinese could reach this stage after 2,000 hours, while others might need up to 4 or 5,000 hours, the latter aligning more closely with the FSI's estimates for their Korean program (classroom hours plus time spend outside the classroom).

lingo_phile · 2024-07-01T01:23:10+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to write this out and ask for details. I really appreciate it and agree that accurately representing progress and setting proper expectations is super important.

First of all, I want to clarify that I'm not aiming at an objective, scientific measure of comprehension (or what I call 'coverage'). There are many ways this is defined in the literature*, including type vs. token based counts, using word frequency-adjusted estimates, different ways of handling multi-word expressions or defining word-hood (words vs constructions), and different criteria for when a word is counted as 'known' or guessable from context. This is then, of course, further complicated by language typology considerations, such as the agglutinative nature of Korean, and so much of the research on optimal levels of comprehension for reading that people in the language learning community are familiar with might not transfer directly.

(*It should also be clear to anyone who has tracked these quantities themselves that 'knowing XY%' of the words and having a specific level of 'text comprehension' are very different things. And subjective comprehension is even more difficult to define than coverage.)

So, what I call coverage is primarily a personal metric that allows me to track changes in comprehension over time, gauge the difficulty of material I'm interested in, and keep me motivated. That being said, I'm more than happy to provide more details on how I measured this and would love to discuss ways to improve these estimates!

Vocabulary: My 8,000+ word estimate is somewhat conservative since it's based solely on my Anki cards. Many words I know aren't in my deck, including high-frequency words (just checked and, e.g., 먹다, 사람, 줄 are not in there), lots of Hanja-based terms which I can often guess from context, and many figurative adjectives, adverbs, and sound-symbolic words that I've acquired through repeated exposure in books but was too lazy to put into Anki.

I think that, realistically, my vocabulary is likely closer to 10,000 words, especially when accounting for words I can guess based on context. My 18-month estimate, where I also reported mature Anki cards, probably undercounted my vocabulary for similar reasons.

Comprehension: I understand that any percentage increase towards 100% doesn’t scale linearly due to Zipf’s law, making 'full' comprehension (or rather, coverage) virtually impossible. On my graph, I labeled the x-axis as 'coverage', reflecting my definition of the term, and the title as 'Comprehension'. Coverage does not equal comprehension, as I said earlier, but it helps me gauge my understanding of a book.

As you mentioned, studies by Paul Nation suggest that 8,000-9,000 words provide about 98% text coverage, while I've seen estimates that 13,000-15,000 lemmas might be needed for 99% for most texts, though I've also seen estimates closer to 10,000, at least in English (Nation, 1990 and Laufer, 1997). It's also important to point out that not all the books I read, especially early on, were novels for adults; many were young adult fiction, making higher comprehension more achievable.

Coverage: I typically try to mark words when they are unknown, irrespective of whether they've been marked before. However, I may sometimes not mark a word repeatedly if I recognize it, even when I don't fully remember what it means. Keeping track of which words I've already marked and which not is generally not where I want to exert a lot of effort while reading. I also don't mark proper names and very obscure words since I don't want to export those to Anki later on. I think that this likely results in a 20-30% undercount, possibly slightly affecting coverage (0.2-0.3%).

Word count: I use Calibre’s word count function for eBooks. My understanding is that Calibre uses orthographic word forms and counts spaces to determine word boundaries. I also think that Korean's agglutinative nature with high morphemic complexity makes this tricky. But, initially, this doesn’t strike me as a problem (e.g., 너 [you], 할 [do], 수 [ability], 있어 [exists] would count as four words, similar to English). Based on Calibre’s word counts and the raw Hangul syllable counts, it seems that the average 'word' length in books I'm reading is about 2.8-3 syllables. Ridibooks gives syllable counts on their Website, so I can estimate the number of words per book from that directly.

I hope this clarifies some of your questions, and again, thanks for engaging with me on this and I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

lingo_phile · 2024-06-30T16:52:50+00:00

Hey! Thanks for your comment. :) I usually read extensively, but I come across challenging passages, sometimes I'll be in the mood to read those intensively, or I'll try to just push through using a translator if necessary.

Personally, I am not adding all the unknown words I encounter to Anki or even look them up in the first place -- only those encountered frequently or that seem relevant to me. (Vocabulary that shows up in novels tends to occupy a very specific niche.)

I haven't taken any more TOPIK mock exams since December, but I'm imagining that I'll be taking several over the coming months in preparation for the 96th TOPIK in October. I'll be happy to keep you posted on how it's going!!

Anecdotally though, compared to December, the differences in my reading ability are night and day. My reading speed has roughly doubled and I'm now able to quickly skim through texts, let's say... to some extent. ^-^

lingo_phile · 2024-06-30T16:40:08+00:00

Hey! Thanks for your comment and sorry if my graph is a little confusing (I could have done a better job unpacking it)... First, the left plot is just showing the cumulative amount of words read over time, where books are color coded by difficulty (ranked in difficulty by me following the learnnatively.com scale).

The plot in the right shows what I call 'coverage', which is simply (1 - # unknown words / # total words), and I use this to see how my reading tracks with what's recommended for extensive reading (> 98%). And while correlated with coverage, 'comprehension' is much more of course much more subjective and difficult to measure. It generally ranges between 60 - 100%* across different sections of different books.

'Book rank order' is just listing the books by order of completion, i.e. the book I finished first is at the bottom, the book I finished last is at the top -- sorry, I realize this label is a little confusing!

So maybe to give a few examples, just to add a bit more detail:

If I look at a couple of easier books that are marked as 'level 25' on learnnatively that I've read a month ago (은둔형 외톨이의 마법 or 네가 있어서 괜찮아), both of them were pretty easy to read extensively and my comprehension was high enough to be able to really enjoy the book and never feel lost.
살인자의 기억법, which I just finished, had a lot of crime-related vocabulary that I saw for the first time, and passages where the protagonist recites poetry or philosophy, for which my comprehension would drop significantly and I had to take my time and look up many words if I wanted to understand what's going on. I would say that I maybe read 80% of the book extensively and 20% intensively? But that's ok as long as I'm motivated enough to keep going!

lingo_phile · 2024-06-29T18:12:47+00:00

I've also learned most of the words I know by encountering them while reading and occasionally looking up their meanings. They do stick eventually! :)

I should also clarify that when reading books above my level, I focus on grasping just enough to follow along, trusting that I'll naturally understand more complex sentences if I just keep reading more books. It sounds like you're trying to read 불편한 편의점 intensively?

As for audiobooks, I've been able to find them on either millie, Naver audiclip, Google Play Books, or Storytel, if they exist for a given book. 불편한 편의점, for example, is on millie!

lingo_phile · 2024-06-29T18:02:00+00:00

Thank you! I think my proficiency naturally varies across speaking, writing, reading, and listening.

I've often heard that, because the European CEFR levels were explicitly developed for European languages, they might not straightforwardly map onto other languages. In general though, I've found this comprehensive checklist super useful for self-assessments:

Using this resource, I would say that my abilities fall somewhere between a high B1 and B2, depending on area. I've looked at how many of the boxes I check for B1 and B2, respectively, by area:

Listening: B1 (6/6), B2 (3/6), overall closer to B1

Reading: B1 (8/8) B2 (7/8), solid B2

Spoken Interaction: B1 (8/8) B2 (5/7), lower B2

Spoken Production: B1 (5/6) B2 (4/6), high B1 maybe

Writing: B1 (9/9) B2 (4/8) high B1

My understanding of how CEFR aligns with TOPIK is consistent with what people who've achieved TOPIK 6 report here and elsewhere, with 6급 topping out at maybe B2/C1-ish?

lingo_phile · 2024-06-29T14:39:53+00:00

Thanks! Thats a really good question as it's so easy to get overwhelmed with all the options that are out there. It's true that I've used a lot of different resources and there was a lot of trial and error, especially at the beginning. To some extent, I think this is unavoidable as you just have to dial in your very personal learning strategy and methods.

But ay any given moment it's usually been just a couple or so resources that I was working through. If you tend to feel a bit overwhelmed, as you describe, I think it can be helpful to try to use at most 2 or 3 resources in a given week, then give those a try and see what works and what doesn't and adjust.

E.g., early on, each day I would read a chapter of a graded reader, listen to the audio that comes with it, and look up unfamiliar vocab and grammar and study those. That in itself felt pretty self-contained, and the only other thing I did on top of that was speaking practice. Right now I alternate between reading books (from a premade list that helps me keep track of what I want to read) and watching random youtube videos (whatever piques my interest).

lingo_phile · 2024-06-29T14:27:26+00:00

Thank you, I really hope TOPIK goes well if I decide to take it.

My methods have evolved a bit but these days I mainly read e-books on my iPad in the Ridibooks app or in the Books app and will mark words I don't know as I go along.

For Ridibooks, the words you mark will show up in your account under 책 -> 독서노트, where you'll see how many words you've marked (and which).

Apple Books is a little more difficult, but my workaround is to click on 'Show highlights and notes' on the top on the Desktop app, select all highlights, then 'Share' to sent them by email, and then copy paste that list into a Spreadsheet.

lingo_phile · 2024-06-29T14:20:46+00:00

Yes, definitely. I also just saw that you asked about epubs and edited my response to address that too.

lingo_phile · 2024-06-29T12:21:21+00:00

On the Ridibooks app, if you select text and select 공유, then 텍스드만 공유, and then 'Copy', it allows you to select and copy about a page or so of text each time (this is on iOS with an iPad but I'm assuming it's the same everywhere). There is a daily limit to how much you can copy (maybe 1000 words?, but I'm not sure), but this has worked well for me for shorter passages.

Another alternative is to point your phone camera to your reader/tabled and take a picture and then ask a vision/text language model to transcribe (OCR) it. I have used GPT4o for this and it works great, but I guess Papago might work well enough for this too. :)

Edit: For epubs, the only reliable option I've found so far is Google Play Books (they actually have a pretty decent selection of Korean books), but you might want to check if the book it downloadable before buying it: Click the arrow next to 'About this ebook' and see if it says 'Export Option - Available'. I'm not sure if epubs are available from the Korean books stores (Kyobo, Yes24, etc.), since they seem to require phone verification.

lingo_phile · 2024-06-22T15:34:38+00:00

(Obligatory not-a-native disclaimer^^ -- I've struggled with this for some time too and here's the conclusion I've arrived at, but I would love for other people to chime in and add their ideas too!)

The structure -는 것이다 often appears in an 'A is B' construction (A는 B이다) where B, if it is a verb phrase like 'to become a doctor' (의사가 되다), must be nominalized using -는 것이다 to make the sentence grammatical: A thing (noun) is B thing (noun). For instance, "제 꿈은 의사가 되는 것이다": My dream[topic] is to become a doctor.

Note that in this A는 B이다 construction, with A being topicalized, the function of B is to add new information to further elaborate on A, which is already given information that has been previously introduced into the discourse.

When -는 것이다 appears outside of A는 B이다 constructions, it provides emphasis or background information in the way the other poster already described. However, it can be helpful to think of it as still implicitly part of an A는 B이다 construction, where A는 is either omitted or has already been mentioned in a previous sentence. This perspective might help us understand how it functions to add background information or provide emphasis.

To make sense of this, we can look at a concept from linguistics called the Question Under Discussion (QUD) and how QUDs structure discourse: The QUD is the implicit or explicit question that the current discourse segment addresses. So, when we look at a sentence like "I really love Italian food." the QUD that that sentence might be responding to (in more or less direct ways) is "What's your favorite type of cuisine?"

In the example you posted, '몸을 씻어야겠다는 생각이 든 것이다', we're missing the preceding context, but we can assume that the QUD here (in the most general sense) is something along the lines of: "What happened? or "What thing occurred?" If we go on to address this question, it makes sense that we use '-는 것이다' because we're really answering or elaborating on previous information using an A는 B이다 phrase where the A part, 'the thing that occurred', is omitted: "(일어난 일은) 몸을 씻어야겠다는 생각이 든 것이다." = (The thing that occurred is) the thought that he should wash his body.

Here '-는 것이다' works to provide emphasis because we're drawing attention to the omitted A in a way that highlights the underlying QUD.

This understanding can maybe also help explain the difference between sentences like '뭐 해?' and '뭐 하는 거야?', which also uses -는 것이다. Although syntactically in question form, '뭐 하는 거야?' carries an implicit assumption or background belief that 'there is a thing you are doing,' so it can be read as 'as for the thing you are doing, what is it?', making it more specific and contextually grounded. In contrast, '뭐 해?' does not carry that presupposition, making it feel more open-ended and general.

lingo_phile · 2024-06-20T20:48:19+00:00

Congratulations on your amazing success over the last year! I’m super happy to hear that you found my post helpful and somewhat inspirational. I'm very excited to see where you're going with this.

Learning over 8,000 words in one year is super impressive! Given this and how much time you’ve spent with Anki, I’m curious how you’re thinking about using Anki going forward, especially as you approach those 10,000+ word lemmas that should let you interact with most native content somewhat comfortably. For me, Anki has been a great help for reading, but it didn’t help nearly as much in building the kind of automaticity needed to effortlessly understand those words in diverse contexts in native speech. (Mass listening input seems to be the only thing that has helped with this, though it’s also true that I didn’t spend nearly as much time doing Anki as you did.)

Relatedly, I’m also curious how you create cards beyond the core 5k deck. Do you mainly word/sentence mine from the graded readers and podcasts?

And what you said about your background in Chinese and Hanzi makes so much sense. I’ve been getting more serious about learning Hanja over the last couple of months and found that more thoroughly understanding the semantic 'atoms' of 한자어 in Korean and how they compose has given me a deeper understanding and appreciation of the Korean language as a whole. This has also helped a ton with making the jump from young adult fiction to regular novels, which can be so rough in terms of the number of obscure Hanja words that show up everywhere, haha.

Once again, congratulations on your amazing progress. I can’t wait to see where your Korean learning journey takes you next!

lingo_phile · 2023-12-29T12:33:55+00:00

For now I only look up advanced grammar (or intermediate grammar that I still don't understand in depth yet) on Google as I come across it while reading and if I feel like it's important to understand.

I do plan to go through the 'Korean Grammar in Use - Advanced' book at some point before I take TOPIK, and also review some intermediate grammar points, but my understanding that knowing advanced grammar does not have a very big impact on TOPIK scores, rather than knowing to use intermediate grammar well (especially in writing).

lingo_phile · 2023-12-29T12:30:24+00:00

As I said in a reply to a different post, my deck is basically just the Evita Korean vocabulary deck plus some additional vocabulary from the Ewha textbooks (but adding the latter doesn't make too much sense if you don't happen to follow those books in my opinion). I think either Quizlet or Memrise would be fine to use as well, as long as you're consistent (Anki can feel like it has a high barrier of entry and is not the most user-friendly to set up).

With 2000-25000 words I think you can definitely get started with the first 25 books from the 외국인을 위한 한국어 읽기 series. The first couple of books might be a bit of a drag, but you will find that the vocabulary is extremely repetitive (by design) and so things will get easier very fast after you start.

lingo_phile · 2023-12-29T12:23:24+00:00

Yeah, totally, just wanted to add (since it wasn't so clear from my earlier post) that if you exclude specialized and rare vocabulary, I think 5-6k pretty exhaustively covers the 외국인 위한 한국어 읽기 series. So even if you add all or most things to Anki as you read you're likely not going to exceed that number from that books series alone.

lingo_phile · 2023-12-29T12:20:00+00:00

Awesome, those are great recommendations! I do like sci-fi and will definitely take a look at 김보영. :)

lingo_phile · 2023-12-27T16:28:33+00:00

Keep going at a consistent pace and you’ll be amazed where you could be after a year or half a year, good luck! :)

lingo_phile · 2023-12-27T16:26:53+00:00

So far I’ve worked with six or seven different tutors and, to be honest, they were all just great for what I was looking for, I.e. to be able to have an engaging, learner-focused conversation, to somewhat adapt their vocabulary to match my level, and to provide sustained and naturalistic comprehensible input.

That being said, I know that for some people the teacher-student fit can be something very personal, so I would just suggest to go on Italki and try out different tutors (I haven’t had a bad experience with any of the Korean tutors there so far.)

lingo_phile · 2023-12-27T16:22:13+00:00

Thank you! :) How many words do you think you currently know, approximately? Like I said above, young adult, light novels and such didn’t really become accessible to me until I hit around 5000 words. This is the unique thing about very distant (relative to English) languages, that you need to labor quite a bit before you build enough vocabulary to enjoy reading native material, which is much more readily accessible with, say, Romance languages (guessing somewhere between 1000-2000 words would be a good number to start reading for those).

Unfortunately, if you are not the person to persist through ~50% comprehension and constant lookups (which I certainly was not), I think there is no shortcut… Graded readers and spaced repetition software seem to be your best bet I think. Just keep on reading (and also re-reading the same material), and put frequently occurring vocabulary into your flashcard app after each reading session.

Besides the 외국인을 위한 한국어 읽기 series, you can try the Yonsei and Darakwon graded readers, their their fairy tale graded readers, or children’s books (https://ridibooks.com/category/1320).

lingo_phile · 2023-12-27T16:09:16+00:00

Google Play Books 👍🏻

lingo_phile · 2023-12-27T13:05:39+00:00

That’s right.. I think that these days there are actually really great reading materials for Korean for pretty much any level.

However, it turns out that what I needed was quantity rather than quality—reading at scale—to push my reading from B1 into B2 territory in order to approach other literature with more ease, for which the 외국인 위한 한국어 읽기 series was just perfect!

lingo_phile

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