What it takes to learn a language

I recently ordered some korean manhua (7 volumes) straight from South Korea, in korean. I bought them mainly because I loved the artwork. But now that I got them and saw that there were 4 books I have yet to read, I realized that I can't just look at these books, I have to read them! And they aren't available online in english yet, who knows when they will be since this isn't a very well known series.

So I started trying read this manga by using google translate and other korean dicitinaries and such. I could already read hangul (it's super easy, which is awesome) so reading it wasn't a problem really. The problem was understanding it, which turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.

I thought I could put some words into google translate and understand a sentence, but NO! 90% of the time that does not work at all.
There is probably only one sentence so far that I have been able to translate into a flawless and fully understandable English sentence. Most other times I can pick out the words in a sentence if I am lucky, but still not be able to make any sense of the sentence.

This makes me realize how much Japanese I actually know. The fact that I can read Japanese manga and understand everything now seems quite awesome.

One thing I realized pretty quickly when translating sentences from korean to english was that it was hard to know where a word ended. For example "Pirul" translated as "blood", but I later learned that blood is just "Pi", and rul is a particle (like the Japanese particle GA if I remember correctly). Still it got translated as only "blood". This happened all the time, so to actually know where words end and particles etc start, I had to go on to learn grammar instead of just words.

It would seem like grammar is king, if you don't know the grammar you wont understand the sentence even if you might know the nouns or verbs etc in it.
So I started looking up grammar when I had the feeling I had encountered it. For example, i, ka, rul, nun, e ke, etc would pop up all the time and I began to get suspicious. Turns out they are all particles!

Like I said it has been a lot harder to try to read this korean manhua than I thought, and it will take forever for me to make sense of it. BUT! Atleast I know Japanese and that has truly been very helpful.
Korean sentences are pretty much structured like Japanese ones (Subject, Object, Verb-style) and they use particles in pretty much the same way. I just have to remember that "un/nun" is "HA(or wa if you please)" in Japanese and then I know how to use it.
It's easier to translate from Korean to Japanese and vice versa than from/to English.

Also the two languages share many common words, and those are always nice to come by.

So, how many years will pass before I understand what's written in this korean manhua? Not sure, but one day I hope to get there!