I found out it's very hard for non-Koreans to learn Korean.
What is the most difficult part in learning Korean?
José, you can make that sound almost without moving your lips^^ Try to lower the tongue to make the inner of the mouth to about that shape :)
As for me, it was definitely the grammar. Woah. This sentence structure. And not just the basic word order, or your adjectives (descriptive verbs), but it's not exactly getting easier later, when you get verb tenses and later to noun groups. All basic ideas about what a sentence IS seem to be different in Korean when compared to Romance or Germanic languages.
Learning new words is also not easy for a long time. When you learn French and you know English a bit, then you have a lot of familiar words, and that helps a lot! But you have no familiar words with Korean. It took me two years before I was at the point where I can learn new vocabulary more easily because it reminds me of other Korean words. (Hint: For me, it helps to use the look of a word. "First a horizontal vowel, second a vertical one." I can remember it a lot better this way.)
Another difficulty are words that have no translation in any language that I know. I had to do this for about a year until it was getting easier. You have to get used to regularly invent a new meaning in your head, a meaning that you have never used before, and then stick the new sound to this meaning.
That being said -
I love your language.Plus, I enjoy hangeul.
Ah, but I make things sound pretty hard now.
Using the language once you understood how to do it is a lot easier than in so many other languages.
Making new forms is so simple! Both nouns and verbs. All words are so nice. They just do what you want.
1) The first big difficult part are some specific sounds of hangul. I think hangul is the most logical, beautiful "alfabet"/writing system. I simply love it! But for me the pronuntiation of ㅓ/ㅡ and the consonants are hard. ㅓ/ㅡ sounds are difficult because we don't have those sounds; up until now I make a "big O" shape with my mouth to say ㅓ, and a I literally shape my mouth like ㅡ to do that sound. I always laugh at myself because of those shapes I do hahaha, but I hope that with practice I won't need to make big mouth shapes.
The second set of difficult sounds are the consonants. We do have similar sounds like ㄹ, ㄱ, ㄷ, ㄴ, etc., but sometimes I can still confuse these sounds (for example, if I hear 나라 I could possibly mistake it with 다라). I'm still studying the subtle differences.
And the last difficult part for me in this aspect are the double consonants vs the consonants with a "rayita"/line: ㄸvs ㅌ, ㅃ vs ㅍ etc. I have taken recently I test and I completely failed at the ㅆ/ㅅ questions hahaha ㅠ.ㅠ.
2) The second big difficulty is the vocabulary, because is unique. It is true that there are some words that come from English (pizza, coffee, etc.) and those are easy to guess, but almost every word is completely new/unique and it's hard to make associations to those words in order to memorize them. So, for now I'm repeating hundreds of times one word, and then with the next one, and so on.
3) A not-so-big problem was the order of a sentence. In Spanish/English you say "A verb B" and in Korean you say "A(particle) B(particle) verb". The issue that I might have in the future is that I heard that in Korean you drop the subject most of the times (because the context is clear), but in Spanish I use pronouns all the time, so I might get in trouble.
And that's it :D
