The Korean alphabet is easy, but the Korean language itself is extremely difficult and very different from English or French.

Reading and writing in Chinese is very hard but I found the language to be much easier to learn than Korean, especially if you can practice the tones with a tutor.

I speak Korean at a low intermediate level and am a beginner in Chinese. I think that if you want to learn Chinese, you should just go for it. Both languages are totally fascinating in different ways.

The Korean alphabet is very logical and easy to learn, it takes maybe a couple of hours for you to be able to sound out pretty much any word. Learning it is a pretty fun exercise even if you don't end up learning korean.

as others have said, it's super easy to learn the korean alphabet. I had to do it for an intro writing systems class. but the grammar is hyper agglutinative . That means it's a ton of suffixes and prefixes to make your words.

I don't know a lot about mandarin (which is what I assume you mean with chinese), except that the grammar isn't too intense. The characters and tones might be trickier, but I've heard that you can get away with not knowing everything, and you can piece things together sometimes.

at the end of the day, which language you study should depend on which is more fun and interesting for you. my interest in Mandarin is mostly utilitarian, since I imagine it will become much more of a powerful langauge compared to Korean. That being said, there is obviously a lot of really interesting media coming out of Korea, so that could be more fun to help you practice.

I've studied both. Both have upsides and downsides. Don't be discouraged by the amount of Chinese characters as you'll be introduced to pinyin as a romanised way to pronounce their words. You'll eventually pick up a lot of characters while learning vocabulary. Chinese is also more similar to English in grammar as they use subject-verb-object sentences. There is also a lot of use to studying Chinese characters as they are the basis of a lot of East Asian languages, including Korean.
Korean has an easy enough alphabet to learn so you can quickly learn to phonetically say written things. But their grammar and spelling is quite difficult. Plus their typing is completely original and you'd have to learn how to type again. There's also a lot of similarities to Japanese, like their use of particles and honorific conjugation.
Since both Chinese or Korean have a lot in common I think you could start with either one and it would help with the other. I'd recommend Chinese simply because you'd have more opportunities to use it abroad in your home country. Plus S. Korea's western worker market is shrinking with stagnant wages and soaring house prices. China seems to be the hot new place for westeen foreigners to emigrate.

Chinese is an absolute monster and will consume a decade of your life, easily. Traditional Chinese is even worse. Here's an internet classic that will spell out the magnitude of the task: Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard.

The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few years.

Korean is a sensible writing system that you can pick up in an afternoon. Let's get you started: https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/LW1VWGvF46.jpg

Do you want to do calligraphy? Handwriting is totally outdated and will consume huge amounts of time for little gain. Everyone uses computers and phones these days. Unless you want to do calligraphy.

The tones in Chinese tend to be very difficult for English speakers to master, even if you write out everything in pinyin. Like I've met white guys in China who haven't quite gotten it down despite living there for 15 years. The Chinese writing system is also difficult to tackle, but if you use it regularly you tend to pick it up faster than mastering spoken Chinese.

From what I understand Korean seems a lot easier to speak and the Hangul writing system is very clean and logical.

However these two languages are similar

lmao

and obviously use basically the same writing system, save some accents

This is a bit, right?

However these two languages are similar

...

and obviously use basically the same writing system, save some accent

Wut

:very-smart: mongolian