I've learned Japanese for many years (I've passed JLPT N3, but am nowhere near JLPT N2), but for various reasons I find it quite difficult to progress beyond my current level, and as a result it is still very difficult (perhaps prohibitively) to read any kind of go literature, or even watch game commentary.

I'm curious if anyone has tried to learn Korean with the intention of reading Go books, and if so what was your experience like? How long did it take you before you were able to understand sentences from a book (with the help of a dictionary is ok), and how long did it take before you were able to grasp more complex ideas from a book?

Do you have any suggestions for language resources I might find useful, assuming I decide to go down this route?

As a native Chinese speaker, my personal experience has been that knowing Chinese was helpful, but not very important. I think English resources are good enough nowadays that it's possible to become quite strong without the need to refer to resources in other languages. It seems a bit inefficient to learn Korean solely for Go - I'd imagine your time would be spent much much more efficiently in actually studying Go

Maybe Kirby learned Korean specifically so he could play Baduk with his Korean wife.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

This may very well be true, but I enjoy learning languages anyway, and I also enjoy taking a break from studying Go sometimes.

If you know some Japanese already, Korean will be a bit easier. Just don't get words mixed up between languages.

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i've never studied any of these languages, but according to what i've heard, from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Japanese is the easiest to learn and Korean the hardest. i don't remember how much it applied to the languages as whole and how much only to conversation. surely the overall difficulty is also influenced by the alphabet, where Korean Hangul is the easiest and Chinese script the hardest

if your intention is to read go literature, i expect that learning Japanese better would be the the most effective way to go

deviating further away from your questions, choosing myself, i would also consider Hangul's elegant simplicity, and Chinese' tonality which makes it sound so pleasant and musical (at the same time making it more challenging to learn)

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Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.

I like watching KWOW (Korean word of the week) with professor Oh, on youtube. If you find it to be not for your taste, have a look at the early episodes where she explains alphabet and basic grammar etc., before totally dismissing.

Through watching lots of Korean movies I learned to swear at a reasonable level, which may not be a good thing. And then there are all those K-Pop girl groups, fun to watch, but I end up remembering very cheesy&girly phrases.

Difficulty depends on the person, but for me, Japanese is easier than Korean for three reasons:
1.) Easier sounds - Japanese sounds end primarily in vowels (except for ん).
2.) Showing kanji - Both Korean and Japanese have kanji-based words, but in Korean, they are hidden behind hangul. You have to guess the kanji, but in Japanese, they are just there. This only applies to written language, of course.
3.) I studied Japanese first - Since I tried learning Japanese first, it is the basis for my comparison.

That being said, Hangul IS very intuitive. I think I learned it in a day or so.

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The difficulty in Japanese for me comes from the fact that there are very many words which, by themselves, have little to no meaning (or are very ambiguous), but only take on meaning when used in conjunction with other words (which also often have no meaning by themselves), and then on top of that even after the resulting combination or sentence pattern, the resulting meaning is not only wildly different from other similar combinations, it often causes the entire sentence to take on different meaning (so it has global meaning, instead of local meaning)

On top of that, it's very time consuming to look up a word in the dictionary if you don't know what it means. First there's the issue of kanji. But the word might have multiple kanji. And since you don't know what the reading of the word is, you first have to look up each individual kanji in a kanji dictionary, and copy-paste them into a word search. But wait, not done yet! Is it a verb? Then you have to convert it from conjugated form to dictionary form, and since different dictionary forms often conjugate to the same conjugated form, it's not always clear exactly what word you're looking for. It can take me a couple minutes sometimes just to look up 1 word in a dictionary.

Then there's the issue of words with similar meanings. Ugh, don't even want to get started on this.

Anyway, I'm kind of getting off topic now

Given that you've learned some Korean, how long do you think it would take to learn enough that one could understand parts of a strategy book with the help of a dictionary? Obviously time-wise it always varies between people, but let's just say in terms of # of semesters of a typical college korean course, assuming you ace every course?

I'm actually studying Korean for the sole purpose of being able to use it to read Baduk books in the future (although i didn't have so much time to study it lately). After more than 6months of studies (in an official class at the uni twice per week), I think I'd need at least 2 more years before being able to somehow understand what some Baduk books are saying. I'm taking this more like an investment for the future especially since my level now wouldn't really benefit from advanced books in Korean.

Looking words up in the dictionary in Japanese can be difficult at first, and I think that's why they have different ways to look up Kanji. Of those ways, I think it's easiest to look up by radical. If you learn (almost) all of the radicals it is faster to look up words.

Plus, in some cases - though it is not always the case - the meaning and/or sound can be guessed by looking at the radical components.

Regarding verb forms and stuff, there are a limited number of ways to conjugate things, so eventually, you can recognize what the dictionary form is more easily.

That being said, in addition to what you've mentioned, one tricky part of Japanese in my opinion, is the fact that Kanji can have many different readings, depending on context. For example, there are a few different sounds that 行 can have.

Korean kanji/hanja words, on the other hand, typically have more consistent pronunciation. It's common for a given kanji/hanja to have a single reading, though this is not always the case.

RegArdinG the question of how lonG it takes to be able to read a text, it is very hard to say - books can vary in difficulty.

The good thing is, it is quite easy to look up words in hangeul, once you understand the conjugations and such that can happen...

I'm sorry that I cannot give a precise estimation, but I will say this: If your goal is to read strategy texts, then practice doing this. It will be hard at first, but if you keep at it, eventually you will figure it out. Basically, I think you should practice that which you want to excel at... It's obvious advice, I guess, but maybe sometimes overlooked.

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