Selecting the language based on the difficulty will make you learn the language soon.
Korean is not a really popular language. Chinese was marketed as the language of opportunity. Many high schools are offering it as an “extra-foreign” language. Korean culture spread K-pop, K-beauty, and K-drama all over the world. Studying Korean and Chinese at the same time will not allow you to focus on each language. Easier language really depends on the skill you personally find stimulating to learn. Here are some of the differences that help you to choose the language to learn.
Now let us see Chinese or Korean language is more difficult to learn
Characters
Hanzi is the derivative Chinese term and literally means the characters of the “Han,” China began to export its culture beyond its borders. Chinese has more than 7,000 characters, where you have to learn Chinese with each of the 7,000 characters to be able to navigate the Chinese world efficiently.
The Korean language has 24 letters, with 14 consonants. The Hanja are not used as before in school anymore. You will find Hanja only in specific professions such as law or medicine, the written system has spaces.
Writing
Chinese is the origin of Korean languages. Ancient Korean texts were solely written in classical Chinese, and Chinese characters were only studied by the countries for ages in the language of each country following the same grammatical rules. The current writing systems were created for the common people. Korean populations created their own reading and writing systems that are separate from the Chinese one.
Speaking
Chinese has 25 consonants and 22 vowels that overlap distinct tones. Pinyin is the official romanization of Chinese characters for pronunciation. There are a lot of sounds for your mouth to pronounce correctly to make yourself understandable. Chinese is hard to speak and listen to because of its four tones.
In Korean, it’s not as difficult as Chinese, but you will definitely experience more tongue twisters. Korean does have the “L” sound come at the end of a word just before you can hear the vowel that follows. There is also something called double consonants which are harder versions of their single counterparts.
Grammar
The Chinese grammar system is very similar to Western languages as the sentence is constructed around a subject + verb + object structure. The past tense of Chinese is just one character. In Japanese, there is a different counter for different objects to indicate the subject or the direction like and these concepts can be very confusing for foreigners as there is no similarity in Romance and Germanic languages.
Korean has honorific differences and stems when conjugating verbs are much more difficult. It’s pretty hard at the beginning to put together a sentence or conjugate a verb, but it will come naturally with plenty of practice. Korean tenses include the future tense and have different levels of politeness in the verb conjugation.
With so many differences, decide whether your language is either Chinese or Korean in your learning journey!!
There is no language to regret. Learning this will give you a good head start. On the other hand, learning Chinese will help you a lot with getting a job in China. I can definitely say that there are many true benefits to learning Chinese, and Korean and both the languages complement each other. There are many platforms to learn Chinese or Korean, to learn the language with the best platform choose Multibhashi. All the best!!!