This paper presents a study on motivating and demotivating factors in learning Korean. The purpose of this study is to analyze the factors affecting the learning motivation and demotivation of university students in Singapore taking Korean as unrestricted elective, and investigate what differences exist in the motivating and demotivating factors based on their Korean levels. Through the analysis of surveys on university students in Singapore, it was found that their major motivating factors were the travel orientation and the cultural interest. These motivating factors did not show any difference depending on the Korean levels. The major demotivating factors of Korean learners were the evaluation factor and the language factor. By interpreting open-ended responses, the competition factor was found as a demotivating factor. In addition, the competition factor and the language factor showed differences between the first level and the second level and above. This study suggests to motivate Korean learners by applying the major motivating factors to a class and weakening the major demotivating factors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the demotivating factors of students attending a university located in a local area in Korea. The interviews with 17 students who are in three different proficiency groups reveal 8 demotivating factors: 'learning difficulty', 'exam-oriented class', 'low test scores', 'low confidence', 'memorization', 'learning material', 'teacher', and 'grammar translation method'. The main demotivating factor is 'learning difficulty'. Half of the students who mentioned this state that they experienced the learning difficulty when they advanced to middle school from elementary school. The majority of other demotivating factors are closely related to the Korean education system under which both teachers and students do not have much autonomy. The 'teacher' factor which was identified as the main demotivating factor in other studies conducted in western countries is not the main demotivator in this paper. In the distribution of demotivating factors, there do not exist any big differences among the different proficiency groups but it is shown that the low proficiency students experienced demotivation earlier than the higher proficiency students.