Page

Poor Quality Examples

Vague, Inaccurate, and Unimporant:

Their Content

"Korean is similar to Japanese in terms of grammar and sentence structure."

The Problem

This is true insofar as word order and post-position grammatical markers. However, there are MANY languages that have the same word order (the vast majority of all human languages are either SVO or SOV), and that also use post-position grammatical markers. Even English at one point had grammatical post-position markers (ever wonder what the difference is between who and whom are?). This is akin to saying Korean people are similar to Japanese people because they are both humans.

Skip [Cocoon] About (Text with Image)

Inaccurate and Misleading:

Their Content

"They [Japanese. Chinese] both also have their own unique writing systems that are fairly easy to learn."

The Problem

Both writing systems [meaning Japanese and Chinese] are unique, however, they are not equally easy to learn when compared to one another or Korean. While one can learn the basics of Hangeul in a relatively short amount of time (getting proficient with reading/writing is a separate issue) as there are only 24 symbols, this is simply not true for learning Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji) as well as Chinese (traditional and simplified characters). There are thousands of Chinese characters to learn to be literate in the other two languages. Further like any language, the speed with which one can learn is highly individual.

Skip [Cocoon] About (Text with Image)

Inaccurate

Their Content

"However, the Japanese writing system also uses adopted Chinese characters called Kanji. Most Japanese words are written with Chinese characters. The Korean writing system also used something similar called Hanja, but they’re not used as often as in Japanese."

The Problem

Japanese has integrated the use of Chinese characters (referred to as Kanji) into its native writing systems for centuries (which Korean also once did), however, these are not the same as modern Chinese characters. Rather these are often traditional (i.e., much older) versions than what is used in China today. In Korean, these characters are called Hanja (there are some other names) but they are not widely used in modern Korea or Korean whereas Kanji are absolutely necessary to learn to read and properly write in Japanese.

Skip [Cocoon] About (Text with Image)

Completely Wrong

Their Content

"Many words in Korean have Chinese origin, so in that way, Korean and Chinese languages are similar. However, there are no tones in Korean like there are in Chinese."

The Problem

While the majority of Korean words do, in fact, come from Chinese (i.e., Sino Korean words), the origin of the vocabulary does NOT make the languages similar. Grammar, pronunciation, morphological structures, etc. are wildly different despite being geographically close to one another. English vocabulary is largely made up of words from Latin/Greek but the grammatical and phonetic qualities are VERY different from one another. This was one of many reasons why the Korean alphabet was created since it was designed for the Korean language whereas Chinese characters are not!

Further, tones do exist in Korean (and all languages) - they just are not used to change the meaning of words the same way this is done in Mandarin and Cantonese (and other regional languages and dialects). Tones are used to mark surprise, questions, make statements, etc.

Skip [Cocoon] Slider style 1

Other Korean Sites

Questionable, Vague, Inaccurate Quality

Skip [Cocoon] About (Text with Image)

Have we convinced you?

If it is this easy for us to showcase how poor a lot of the free materials are out there on the internet, YouTube, blogs, etc., you can imagine what the quality of other content is like, even if it is "paid" content. The Survival Korean team consists of doctoral holders in language education, Korean as a foreign language, and educational technology professionals! We strive to present information that is simplified where necessary, yet accurate and more detailed all the same!

Poor Quality Examples

Vague, Inaccurate, and Unimporant:

Their Content

The Problem

Inaccurate and Misleading:

Their Content

The Problem

Inaccurate

Their Content

The Problem

Completely Wrong

Their Content

The Problem

Other Korean Sites

Have we convinced you?

Who We Are

Contact

Location

Support Us