🇮🇹 Italy vs 🇰🇷 South Korea | By Suki Nakamura, Out of Africa
The language barrier is the expat experience's most democratic humiliation. It does not care how competent you are in your home country, how impressive your CV is, or how many countries you've previously navigated. It will find you in a butcher shop in Naples, unable to explain what cut you want and holding up a queue of increasingly impatient Italians, and it will also find you in a Seoul pharmacy, attempting to communicate a symptom through a combination of pointing, facial expression, and sheer desperation. The only variable is how the locals respond when this happens to you.
In Italy, they respond with theatrical exasperation, a rapid-fire attempt to help you in Italian regardless, and then — if they like you, which they usually do — a great deal of warmth and probably an unsolicited recommendation for their cousin's restaurant. In South Korea, they respond with polite, slightly pained efficiency, a translation app produced with the speed of someone who has done this before, and a level of service that remains impeccable despite the mutual incomprehension. These are both perfectly viable responses to a foreigner floundering. They produce completely different emotional experiences.
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Learn basic Italian — even a little transforms how people treat you | Expect widespread English in smaller towns; Milan and Rome are exceptions, not rules |
| Use gesture confidently — it is a legitimate communication channel here | Apologise excessively for your Italian; just speak it and they'll help |
| Be patient in regional Italy where accents and dialects are genuinely difficult | Assume a menu translation in English will be accurate or helpful |
| Know that effort and warmth get you further than fluency here | Give up if your Italian phrase produces a flood of rapid Italian in response |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Download Papago (Korean AI translation) — it is your most essential daily tool | Assume the Korean alphabet (Hangul) is too hard; it takes two days to learn to read |
| Learn food vocabulary first — ordering correctly makes daily life immediately better | Expect all younger Koreans to speak English; proficiency varies more than stereotypes suggest |
| Use Naver Maps, which has Korean addresses and public transport in Korean | Rely on Google Maps in Seoul; Naver or Kakao Maps are far more accurate |
| Approach bureaucratic situations with patience and a translation app; staff genuinely try | Speak quickly or use idioms; simple, clear sentences produce the best results |
Italian is one of the most rewarding languages to attempt and one of the least necessary to be good at, which is a paradox that anyone who's lived here will recognise. The country is extraordinarily warm to people who try — and "trying" in Italy means attempting, out loud, in public, with full commitment to the performance of the thing regardless of accuracy. An Italian who hears you mangling their language with genuine enthusiasm will not judge you. They will complete your sentences, slow down, switch to an informal register, and often end up teaching you three new words. The relationship between Italians and their language is essentially the relationship between Italians and food: they are proud of it, they want to share it, and they believe your life will be better if you engage with it properly.
Outside major cities and tourist areas, English simply isn't the fallback it is in Scandinavia or the Netherlands. The elderly woman running the alimentari in a Calabrian village is not going to default to English. The bureaucrat at the local comune who needs to register your address is working in Italian, and the form is in Italian, and the instruction sheet is in Italian, and the whole experience is a reminder that you are not in a country that has decided to translate itself for you.
This is, once you accept it, a gift. It forces engagement. You learn the language because you must, and Italy turns out to be exactly the right place to learn it — surrounded by people who treat your attempts with something between amusement and delight, where every mispronunciation is an opportunity for connection rather than judgement. The Italian language barrier is more porous than it initially appears, and the key to getting through it is confidence, gesture, and a willingness to be wrong loudly.
South Korea presents the language barrier in a more structured way than Italy — which is to say, you can learn to read and write Korean (Hangul) in approximately forty-eight hours of genuine effort, which gets you farther than you'd expect and simultaneously makes you realise how little that helps with actually understanding what you're reading.
Korean is a genuinely complex language for English speakers: an entirely different sentence structure (subject-object-verb rather than subject-verb-object), a complex honorific system that requires knowing the social relationship before selecting the correct speech level, and vocabulary with no meaningful overlap with any European language. This is simply the reality. There is no workaround that produces fluency in a reasonable time frame. You are signing up for years of study and a prolonged period of functional incompetence in daily life.
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What makes this manageable in South Korea is the infrastructure of accommodation. Translation apps here are culturally normalised to a degree that hasn't quite arrived in Europe. Koreans, particularly in service contexts, produce a translation tool as a routine gesture rather than a last resort. QR codes on restaurant tables link to menus in multiple languages. Subway announcements are in Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese. The Korean service ethic — which runs deep and is genuinely extraordinary — means that your language barrier will be treated not as your problem but as a shared problem to be efficiently solved.
What makes it isolating is that social fluency is different from functional fluency, and Korean social life has a complexity — the sunbae/hoobae (senior/junior) relationship structure, the group dining and drinking culture, the office hierarchy that bleeds into social settings — that requires language competence to navigate properly. You can exist in South Korea without Korean. You cannot fully belong without it.
Italy's language barrier is warmer, more forgiving, and ultimately more surmountable through sheer personality than through academic study. You can make real friends in Italy with intermediate Italian and a willingness to try. The barrier here is an invitation.
South Korea's language barrier is structural, patient, and practically supported — but ultimately harder to fully dissolve. The country is extraordinarily good at accommodating non-Korean speakers at the functional level. The social level takes considerably longer.
If you want a language to learn in a country that will cheer you on: Italy. If you want a country that will function reasonably while you learn a very difficult language very slowly: South Korea. Both choices come with rewards. One of them comes with better pasta.
<small>"In Italy, I once tried to order a coffee in the wrong order (you pay first, then order at the bar) and the entire process broke down spectacularly. Three people helped me simultaneously. I left with the correct coffee and an invitation to someone's home." — Internations Rome</small>
<small>"Korean is hard but Hangul really does take two days. Read the signs. Even if you don't know what they say, suddenly the city makes spatial sense. It's weirdly motivating." — Reddit r/korea</small>
<small>"South Korean customer service when you don't speak Korean: extraordinary. Korean social life when you don't speak Korean: very lonely for longer than you'd want. Learn the language." — expat.com Seoul</small>
The language barrier tells you who you are almost as much as it tells you who they are. In Italy, it reveals whether you can be comfortable being wrong, being loud, and leaning on charm when vocabulary fails. The country rewards this specific personality type lavishly.
In South Korea, the barrier reveals your patience — whether you can function competently in a country that has done everything reasonable to accommodate you while you slowly, slowly work toward the language competence you need for the life you actually want. The country is remarkably forgiving during the process. It is also entirely clear about what that process involves.
Neither country will meet you entirely in your language. Both, in their different ways, will make it worth learning theirs.
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Suki Nakamura
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.