Why Adults Struggle With Korean

Adults are not worse language learners than children. They are learners working under different conditions, and Korean exposes those conditions unusually early.

Word order is the first wall

English is subject-verb-object. Korean is subject-object-verb, and it marks the role of each noun with a particle rather than with position. That means an adult English speaker cannot lean on word order to decode a sentence, which is the single most automatic reading strategy they have.

What to do instead

Practice with whole sentences rather than isolated words, so the particle and the verb ending are learned together with the meaning they carry.