>>3750012Grammatically speaking, Japanese and Korean are on the same level of difficulty. Regarding the alphabet, Korean Hangul is easier because there's only set of characters and they learn a set list of Hanja (Chinese characters), but they're mainly used to differentiate between words that are spelled the same, but have different meanings. For example, if you're reading an article in Korean and see a word which you can't readily identify from the context of the sentence, they'll print the Hanja next to it in parenthesis so that you'll know what they're referring to. Japanese has three alphabets, katakana for foreign loan words, hiragana for native Japanese words, and Kanji, the Chinese characters. So, Korean is easier regarding the alphabet.
When it comes to listening comprehension, Japanese is far easier to understand.
So, since they're about the same grammatically and share a large vocabulary based off of Chinese (for example, 'promise' in Japanese is yakosoku and in Korean, it's yaksok), I'd start with Japanese first and then once you're comfortable enough with it, move on to Korean.
Also, unless you're learning these languages for your own personal fulfillment, there is literally no point in learning either Japanese or Korean. The market is BEYOND flooded with translators, there are no jobs.
Don't learn Mandarin, either. It's fucking worthless because you'll only ever really need it in mainland China. I mean, if you have any intention of finding a job and working in China, go for it, but otherwise, it's worthless.
t. former interpreter who lived in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan for varying lengths of time
