This study starts from the notion that accounting is a language of business and attempts to answer the question of whether the IFRS is a more understandable accounting language than a local one, or the K-GAAP. Understandability has been a major qualitative characteristic in differing sets of accounting standards, but not a major research topic in accounting academia. The IFRS puts a still greater emphasis on understandability in financial reporting as a set of global and principlebased accounting standards, In many countries, however, adopting the IFRS involves the process of translating the original IFRS text into local non-English languages. The IFRS Foundation maintains control of translation policies of IFRS adopter countries. Therefore, it would be timely and relevant to examine whether financial statement understandability has changed after the IFRS adoption in non-English speaking accounting regimes. We investigate the effect of IFRS adoption on financial statement readability in Korea. Korea serves as a perfect setting for a study of this kind since it has two concurrent accounting regimes in place for two years before its complete adoption of the IFRS in 2011. We treat understandability as readability, consistent with prior work. We calculate readability of financial statements using the Flesch Reading Ease formula. We compare the 57 IFRS adopter firms and 164 non-IFRS (K-GAAP) adopter firms for the readability of their disclosed financial statement footnotes. The univariate and multivariate results indicate that the IFRS-based financial statements have a significantly lower, not higher, readability than those based on the local accounting standards. Results also show that minority shareholder population and firm age have a significantly positive influence on the association between IFRS adoption and financial statement readability. The findings of this study have both academic and policy implications.