Korean Grammar

So including the major difference in appearance between English and Korean(memorizing symbols for letters is one major hurdle), the entire grammar structure of east Asian languages (Japanese, Korean) is completely different.

Chinese, much like English, has the form "subject, verb, object." Apparently when one does not factor in the memorization of Chinese symbols, this makes Chinese easier to learn for Westerners than Japanese or Korean.

So in English it is, "John is my friend." John here is the subject, "is" is the verb, "my friend" is the object. In Korean, the verb (if there is a verb - we'll get to that later) is at the end of the sentence. Also, adding a noun is apparently optional in Korean if it is implied that the second party knows what the first party is talking about.

Taking all that into account, the sentence could just be "my friend, is." If your not confused already (I certainly am), let's get to the tricky part. Sometimes there are not even verbs. Sometimes there is a syllable that you can add to the end of a noun to give it the properties of a verb. So, this sentence could very well be: "my friend-(verb ending)."

I should also add. If there is a noun in the sentence, and it is the subject of the sentence, then it also receives a special syllable that changes if the noun ends in a consonant or a vowel. So, adding the noun back into our English sentence, the sentence could be "John-(added term based on "hn" ending) my friend-(verb ending)."

Pretty confusing I think. Right now I'm taking baby steps. Oh I forgot to mention there are 21 vowels in Korean. What ever happened to the simple "a, e, i, o, u" of English? There are only 19 consonants, not that bad. Oh wait, but if these consonants are syllable-ending consonants some of them change sounds to other consonants. The symbol does not change, only the sound. I think they threw that in there to really confuse the shit out of Westerners trying to learn the sounds associated with the symbols. Also, there are certain consonant pairings that make one of the consonant sounds jump to the next syllable. Further, that sound can be silent or completely different than if it was alone.

Needless to say, Korean, much like Japanese, is a very hard language to learn.

My goal by the end of my time here is to be able to hold a 3-5 minute conversation with a native speaker. I think that is a realistic goal while here in Korea. At some point I would like to be fluent. But, given I am learning my fourth language, I am experienced enough to know that this will take at least 2 years of constant learning, which I don't have given I want to go to law school and thus will have no time. So realistically I look to have Korean checked off my life's to-do list sometime in the next 5 years with my time here in Korea forming the building blocks.

I hope you guys keep reading as I get ever-more lost in translation.