Hey! I’m a 22-year-old from Turkey. Turkish is my native language, I’m fluent in English and German, and I can read/understand Dutch pretty well (still working on speaking).
I was actually planning to start learning Korean next, and since I already deal with multiple languages, I was wondering: do you have any specific tips for learning languages from very different language families?
I enjoy comparing structures and learning styles, so I’d love to hear what worked for you.
Also, if anyone enjoys casual language exchange alongside these discussions, I’m always open to that too 🙂
You are a multilingual already, so whatever you did is clearly a winning formula. It's not going to be radically different from how you had learnt your current languages. People drastically overestimate the whole "language families/linguistic groups" thing.
Honestly this is spot on - I think people get way too caught up in the "oh no it's from a different family" mindset when really the fundamentals of language learning stay pretty much the same regardless
I don't think language families matter much. Each language has some special features that are new to some learners. The big differences are sounds, writing system and grammar (word usage in phrases, sentence word order, and word endings/suffixes).
Korean uses a subset of the sounds used in T/G/E, plus a few new ones. Korean writing is a different alphabet, but it it still an alphabet, with a symbol for each consonant and vowel. It is also phonetic (at least at lower levels). The biggest difference is grammar. Korean grammar is very different from the grammar of Türkçe or the grammar of English. It isn't difficult, just different.
When I start learning a new language, I start by learning the new sounds and writing sytem. For grammar, I find a beginner course (in English) that explains how things work in the new language. I prefer the classroom/teacher setup (the inexpensive version is a video course on the internet, where each video is one class by a language teacher) but I've used courses that were audio-only or text-only.
For me, most of the time spent acquiring the new language is getting good at understanding sentences. I improve my ability to do that by practicing that every day. I only take a course at the beginning in order to understand TL sentences. I don't memorize lots of grammar rules: I see how those rules work in real sentences.
Different language families just means you get less "freebies"
Memorize more words lol.
For Korean specifically, there might be a few Chinese loanwords where it's worth learning the chinese origin words, but it might be a waste of time lol.
The biggest difference will be learning a new writing system, your brain will take a very long time to instinctively read it and will always be drawn to any Latin characters on the same page. No getting around it.
Isn't Turkish in a separate language family from English? Is it different to learn English because of its place as an international language, compared to Korean?