for English speakers learning Spanish is easy, German or Arabic harder, and Russian or Mandarin really hard. So how is Korean for Mandarin speakers?
English is closely related to German but not to Arabic. Putting them in the same category makes no sense. It’s fairly easy for English speakers to learn Spanish mainly because Spanish and French are so similar and English borrowed tons of words from French (not to mention Latin, Italian and some actual Spanish words).
Mandarin and Korean are not related, although you will find some Mandarin loan words in Korean. It’s going to be about as difficult for a Mandarin speaker to learn Korean as it would be for an English speaker.
I’ll second what John Mace has said.
It’s super hard, just like switching from Englis to Mandarin or Korean. Three totally different languages.
In fact, Korean is generally considered a language isolate, although some propose a relationship with Japanese.
Unlike English, German, Spanish and Russian which are all Indo-European languages, and related to each other to some degree.
Arabic, being a Semitic language, is not related to Indo-European languages (although some linguists postulate a distant relationship between those two language families).
Mandarin, OTOH, is one language in the Sino-Tibetan language family that spreads across much or East Asia.
The research from the Defense Language Institute (DLI) says that the more similarities between the first language and the second language, the faster it is to learn.
Therefore, English speakers can learn Spanish, German, French, and other languages that use the same alphabet faster. But, for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, it’s harder.
Alphabets sometimes, but not always, indicate relationships. Turkish uses the Latin alphabet, but it’s not related to English. Urdu is, but it uses the Arabic alphabet.
The Korean syllabary is actually very easy to learn. It is perhaps the most logical writing system out there. Sure, it adds a bit of a level of difficulty, but not much.
You save a couple of months compared to Chinese, but there is a substantial gap between the Asian languages vs the Western languages.
Not following you. It certainly takes more than “a couple months” to learn written Chinese (or Japanese).
As for a gap between “Asian” and “Western” languages, that’s not really a useful characterization. There are plenty of Asian Indo-European languages, and many of the Languages in Asia are completely unrelated to each other. Linguists don’t classify languages by geography (except in some rare cases where no other scheme is possible), so “Asian” and “Western” don’t really mean anything, linguistically.
In the DLI study, they looked at Americans learning any foreign language. The average number is 24 months. However, for Asian languages, the average is higher, while for Western languages, the number was lower. Iirc, the difference for English speakers was about 6 months on average. So, for learning a Western language, it took about 20 months, while for Asian languages it took around 28 months.
For English speakers studying Japanese, Korean or Chinese, those that studied Japanese and Korean learned a month or two faster than Chinese.
I just wanted to nip this one in the bud immediately: linguistics is a completely different field than language learning. There’s too many people out there now who think that a person with an advanced degree in linguistics is qualified to teach that language. In my state, linguistics is no longer an acceptable degree to teach a second language. It’s kind of the same thing as saying a degree in math is the same as a degree in math pedagogy.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “learning” a foreign language-- speaking only or also being able to read. If you’re learning a Chinese language or Japanese, you have the added task of learning to read-- pretty much like learning two languages at once.
Well, I wasn’t talking about linguists teaching languages. I was just pointing out that “Western languages” isn’t a term that tells us much about how related the languages are. Same with “Asian Languages”. Those are not useful categories. It’s quite possible that English speakers would find certain “Western” languages harder to learn that certain “Asian” languages.
I would not assume that the more closely-related language is in general easier to learn. English is closely related to German, as you said. But Spanish is often reported to be easier than German for English speakers to learn. (Certainly, that is my anecdotal experience, having learned both). You suggest some reasons why Spanish is easier, but I’m not convinced that some familiar vocabulary (via French) is anything like the whole story.
By coincidence, I was talking to my (Japanese-speaking) wife today about Japanese people learning Korean. Although no relationship is proven between the two languages, Korean is apparently considered relatively easy for Japanese speakers; much easier than Chinese, for example.
Korean and Japanese are virtually identical grammatically and phonologically speaking, IIRC.
BTW I’m surprised if Chinese is harder to learn than German for an English speaker. Chinese word-order is almost exactly the same as for English. German is completely inside out.
Word order isn’t the problem. The problems with Chinese are:
(1) Almost none of the vocabulary is related to English (while most German words are related to English words)
(2) Chinese is a tonal language. You need to be able to speak with different tones, and hear the differences between words which sound the same except for different tones.
(3) The writing system is one of the most complex ones: only Japanese (among major languages) has a writing system of similar complexity.
And the difficulties of German word order are exaggerated: once you’ve learned three or four rules peculiar to German, you’ve solved that problem. The big problem is for simultaneous translators, who have to wait for the main verb coming at the end of a clause before they can speak the rest of the clause – and that’s a problem even for translators with native fluency in German 
(2) Chinese is a tonal language. You need to be able to speak with different tones, and hear the differences between words which sound the same except for different tones.
(3) The writing system is one of the most complex ones: only Japanese (among major languages) has a writing system of similar complexity.
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I thought we were just talking about the spoken language, because the OP asks about “conversationa” Korean.
Tones have never seemed like a particularly difficult thing to me–but I can imagine that’s different for different people.
I can see how shared vocabulary can help, of course–though when I was learning German I did get tricked by a lot of false or near cognates.
I wouldn’t go that far. While most Chinese sentence structures would make sense in English, they’d sound stilted and strange in English. You can tell very easily when a Chinese person is speaking English using Chinese sentence structure.
While Chinese grammar is mostly fairly simple, small things can make it difficult.
Chinese uses counter words for everything based on categories. It’s much like we say “a piece of paper” or “a pair of pants.” Except there is a special word for everything. You can never just say “a pencil” or “three fish.” You need the counter. There is a word for things that are broad and flat resembling a table, a word for things that are long and flexible, a word for things that are long a rigid but a totally different word for things that are long and rigid but also round like a pencil, a word for animals that resemble horses, etc. It’s kind of like memorizing the gender for nouns, except with dozens of categories.
Another thing that is odd for English speakers are the strange things that have happened to the language as it has slowly changed from a monosyllabic language to a bisyllabic language. It’s become uncomfortable to have a verb on it’s own- you can’t just read, you have to read books. You can’t just walk, you have to walk the road. Nouns are not exempt either. You can’t just be a woman, you have to be a beautiful (or some other) kind of woman. You can’t just have water, it has to be cold (or hot, boiled, tap, etc.) water. This can make for some odd sentence constructions.
The way of dealing with tenses is totally different. Instead of doing the past-present-future thing, Chinese looks at what state the action is in. It’s a subtle difference, but one that requires looking at time in a totally different way.
But the real problem is the homophones, compound words and writing system- these can make comprehension difficult even for native speakers. In practical terms, understanding Chinese relies a lot on context. Even native speakers sometimes have trouble understanding a single word in isolation. If you’re comprehension is below a certain threshold, you are going to have trouble understanding even the basic gist of the conversation because it’s hard to pick out key words on their own.
I don’t think you recall that correctly. I’ve lived in Japan for just over five years and am now in my sixth continuous year in Korea (8th year total). I speak both lingos, but not as well as I wish. The phonology of the languages seems to not be virtually identical. In addition, the grammars, while having many similarities, also have many differences.
Here is the wiki on Japanese Phonology and over here is the wiki on Korean phonology. I think even a cursory perusal of those two sites will show that they’re more different than identical.
A knowledge of classical Chinese characters (as opposed to simply Mandarin) would help you learn Korean the same way a knowledge of classical Latin would help you learn English. Which is to say, not a whole lot at the basic level, and definitely not for conversational purposes.
When I first learned Korean, one had to learn a fair number of Chinese characters simply to read the daily newspaper. Now, that’s not such a big issue as the current trend is to spell all of the words in the newspapers with Hangeul. Students at my school, as at any other middle school in the country, are still required to learn a set number of the Chinese characters but that is not as practical as it was years ago.
How many characters are they required to learn?
I have not seen the study, but when I was a student at DLL (a long, long time ago…) program length was 24 weeks for French, Spanish and Italian. German was 32, Russian and other Slavic languages a year. Mandarin and Japanese were 14 months, I believe.
At the end of the programs, everyone could get by in the language, but IIRC, being able to read and write was not a primary goal of the Japanese and Chinese programs.
Interestingly, there were sub-classes of French and Italian for Haitian Creole and Sicilian (oddly - the Sicilian guys wore suits, not uniforms 
They started out with the French and Italian classes but split off and finished later than normal).