Japanese vs Korean: which should you learn?

Is Japanese or Korean harder for English speakers?

On the most quoted measure, neither. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which trains US diplomats, puts both in Category IV, its "super-hard" group of languages "exceptionally difficult for native English speakers", with Arabic, Cantonese and Mandarin. Its students need about 88 weeks, or 2,200 class hours, to reach a professional level of speaking and listening, against 24–30 weeks for Spanish or French.

The difference is where the work falls. Here is how the two compare, with numbers from the free chapters 1–2 of every series in the Contos Japanese and Korean libraries:

So Korean gets you reading real sentences sooner, and Japanese asks for a long stretch of kanji study that Korean doesn't. After that, the two climbs look much alike. For timelines in each, see how long it takes to learn Japanese and how long it takes to learn Korean.

How different are the scripts on the page?

Very. Korean is written in Hangul, an alphabet whose official spelling rules fix it at 24 letters, 14 consonants and 10 vowels, stacked into syllable blocks. Japanese uses two syllable scripts plus kanji, and Japan's list of kanji for everyday writing has 2,136 of them.

Strikingly, a beginner chapter is about the same length in both. In the Contos libraries, a free A1 chapter averages 303 characters in Japanese and 297 syllable blocks in Korean. What goes into those chapters differs:

• Japanese A1: the free chapters use 368 different kanji on top of the two kana sets, and the kanji share keeps rising, to 34% of the characters at B2.
• Korean A1: the free chapters use 485 different syllable blocks, every one built from the same 24 letters. Once you know the letters, you can sound out all of them.
• Spacing: Korean's spelling rules write each word separately, so a free A1 chapter has about 105 space-separated words. Japanese has no spaces; Contos inserts them so you can see and tap each word.

Our guides to the Japanese writing system and learning Korean by reading cover each script in more detail.

How similar is Japanese grammar to Korean?

Close enough that one helps with the other. Both put the verb at the end, mark each noun's role with a particle after it, and change the verb ending for politeness. Contos writes the same story ideas separately in each language. In the grandmother's-birthday series, both chapter 1s have someone holding an old object, and the sentences line up almost word for word:

The topic particle は matches 는, the object particle を matches 을, and the -ている form for an ongoing state (持っています) matches Korean -고 있다 (들고 있습니다). Here are the particles you meet first:

One difference shows up in the Contos stories themselves. Japanese A1 chapters are narrated mostly in the polite -masu form (22 of the 24 free A1 chapters), while Korean A1 chapters mostly use the plain written style ending in -다 (19 of 24). Korean learners meet plain narration from the start; Japanese learners meet it at A2.

Do Japanese and Korean share vocabulary?

Yes, through Chinese. Both languages built much of their everyday vocabulary from Chinese roots, and the pronunciations drifted apart in each, so many words are related without being identical. These pairs appear in the free beginner chapters of both libraries:

Japanese writes these words in kanji, so a learner sees the shared root; Korean writes them in Hangul, so the link is heard rather than seen. Either way, the second language you learn gets a head start on this layer of vocabulary, though not on the native words, which are entirely different.

Which should you learn first?

• You want to read real sentences within weeks: Korean. Hangul is a small alphabet, and A1 stories need nothing else.
• You already read Chinese characters: Japanese. Kanji are the biggest hurdle for most learners, and you are partly over it.
• A place, a person or a culture is pulling you: follow it. Both languages take years, and the one you care about is the one you will still be reading next year.
• You want both: take one to a comfortable A2 first. The grammar you learn will carry across, but two new scripts at once is a heavy start. See learning two languages at once.

Contos has story series from A1 to B2 in both languages, with chapters 1–2 of every series free. Reading the first chapter of each is a cheap way to see which one you want to keep going with. If Japanese wins, is Japanese hard? goes deeper on what to expect.