I think that it might not be necessary for a native Korean speaker to know Chinese characters to speak Korean well, but it can be helpful to a non-native speaker to guess the meaning of words.

For example, if you know a little about Chinese characters, and you know the hanja for the words 선생님 and 방학, you might be able to infer the meaning of 학생, even if you didn't study that particular vocabulary word, yet.

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be immersed

If you've chosen to study either Mandarin Chinese or Korean, then you might want to check out Radio Free Asia. You can listen online - or with your short wave radio.

RFA homepage (english)
RFA broadcast schedule

Yes, you can see the pronounciation by the word itself is an advantage. From this point, Korea maybe more easy for European to master.
Chinese is a very different language, and much more difficult to master, I have to admit.
But，Go is much more difficult than fly chess too, why didn't you choose fly chess?

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Recommended a new Go server——http://www.wuzheng.org

because go is a game and learning new language is not.

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"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

What the hell is fly chess?

It's a sideshow at the flea circus, I guess...

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Chinese maybe hard to learn(actually I don't think so, it's a pithy and beautiful language), but when you master it, it'll benefit you lot.
One-quarter of people in this earth using it everyday.
It has been used for 3 thousands years. A common middle school student can read the original books written thousands years ago easily, can you believe it?

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Recommended a new Go server——http://www.wuzheng.org

Regarding Chinese, don't the simplified characters interfere with using knowledge of Chinese characters to help with Korean or Japanese?

A friend of mine from China told me that he could read a Japanese newspaper and get the basic meaning of it - without being able to pronounce the words, of course - without having studied Japanese at all.

I suspect he was exaggerating, but there's probably still some truth to what he said.

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be immersed

i dont think it is exaggerated. many koreans who studied and read chinese character also can read chinese news paper and understand 95% or more. although we use different character to represent samething their basic meaning will let us understand the meaning behind the sentence.

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"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

From what I understand Classical Chinese is completely different from modern Mandarin and almost impossible for even an untrained native speaker to understand.

Source: Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard:

Thanks, that's a great article.

I know, I re-read it once a year or so to remind myself why I'm not learning Chinese.

Go is difficult than Chinese for me. Korean is easier than Japanese.

It is said that--
Korean is difficult to enter, easy to come out;
Japanese is easy to enter, difficult to come out;
Chinese is difficult to enter, and you never come out.
By enter, it means start of learning a language and by come out it means mastering a language.

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求而不得
舍而不能

With that definition, I'd switch Japanese and Korean around. It's very easy to learn Hangeul so that you can read words phonetically in Korean - but you don't know the meaning of any words. In contrast, Japanese requires that you learn a lot of Kanji before you can read something phonetically - and in doing so, you'll learn the meanings of words as well. On the other hand, once you have learned a lot of Kanji for Japanese, it's pretty easy to understand a lot of people. But just knowing Hangeul won't get you very far in Korean. Japanese pronunciation is also easier to pick up on.

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be immersed

MAybe korean is harder than japanese from a gramatical point of view? You can start learning japanese with hiragana. This way you can build sentences even if you don't master all the necessary kanji. You won't understand the newspapers, but it makes small talk accessible to the beginner.

There are actually some surprising similarities for the *basic* Korean and Japanese grammar. I would say that they are much more closely related than one of them is to English.

What I find difficult in Korean comes down to two main points, probably:
1.) It is harder to pronounce than Japanese (in my opinion).
2.) Kanji (hanja) is hidden. I think this makes it harder for non-natives in reading. There is a steeper learning curve to learning Kanji, but it is certainly valuable once you learn it. And it makes it difficult to a non-native speaker when chinese characters are hidden in Korean (not in pronunciation, of course, but in extracting meaning).

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be immersed

Thank you for all your interest and help guys. I have (for now) decided to go for Korean. I ordered a "self study course" and it should arrive sometime this week.
I chose Korean because the language itself interests me the most. I also happen to have a couple of Korean go books that have both the Korean and the English text, which should prove to come in handy to practice reading and go at the same time.

What do you mean, kanji is hidden? *curious*

There are some "pure Korean" words, but there is a significant portion of words that are based off of Kanji, just like Japanese is (in Korea, they call Kanji Hanja).

To give a simple example, you can think of the word for language, 言語. In Japanese, you can see two characters here: 言 and 語. If you know one of the characters, but not the other, you can have some idea that the word has something to do with talking or language, so you might be able to stab a guess at the meaning of the word. Also, if you've seen the same kanji in different contexts, for example 言う　or 日本語, you might be able to draw some conclusions on the meanings of the characters, even if you haven't studied the exact word, 言語.

Now let's look at Korean. Korea actually has the same word, which is based off of the same characters: 언어. The 言 is pronounced as 언, and the 語 is pronounced as 어. However, by looking at the word, "언어", you do not know for sure that the Hanja that comprise the word are 言 and 語. That's because there could be different Chinese characters that have the same pronunciation. For example, 魚 in 魚油 is pronounced 어 as well (just like 語), but 魚油 (어유) means "fish oil", which is totally unrelated to 語.

Therefore, if you learn the word 어유 (fish oil), and then later hear the word, "언어", if you have to take a stab at guessing the word, you might end up with a fishy interpretation (yuk, yuk) of the meaning.

If they were to show the Hanja/Kanji in Korean, like they do in Japanese, when you see the word for fish oil, you'd see the symbols, "魚油". Then when you saw the word for language, you'd see "言語". It's totally clear that we're dealing with 4 different symbols. But with hangeul, if you see the word 어유 and then later see the word 언어, you can try to guess the meaning of the underlying symbols (eg. "is it 言魚??"), but it is not clear which symbols are actually behind the word.

In Japanese, they simply show the symbols, so there is no confusion when you're reading.

I think it's for this reason that, sometimes in Korean newspapers, you'll see an ambiguous word, and the chinese characters will be shown in parentheses behind it. This helps to clarify any ambiguity that may arise from guessing what the hidden hanja are.

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