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I've started learning Korean recently, and I've run into trouble. Unfortunately, my teacher, being a native Korean speaker, has a hard time sympathizing with my issues, and has given me the simple advice of "practice more." I'm not saying the advice is incorrect or not valuable, but it's not very helpful when I don't even understand why I'm making the mistakes I am.
I'm having trouble distinguishing consonant sounds in Korean. Multiple consonants all sound similar. Not even between normal and double consonants, but different consonants that are supposed to sound different all sound the same to me. In fact, sometimes I have trouble hearing the consonant being pronounced at all, especially at the beginning of words. I can, with difficulty, read characters out loud. But when listening to characters being spoken, I cannot write them with sufficient accuracy. This is a problem that I've talked to multiple Korean speakers with and it seems that it's something that they intuitively understand to the point where they have trouble understanding my problem. Is this something anyone else has struggled with, and what are some things that I can do to help?
Fellow Korean learner who encountered similar issues and spent way too much time contorting my tongue and sounding like an idiot in the shower. There is a logic (with some exceptions, like any language), but it's too intuitive for native speakers to think about explicitly so it's often left for us foreigners to inductively reason out ourselves.
Spelling makes much more sense when you realize Korean used to be written in mixed script of Chinese characters and Hangul (kind of like modern Japanese). Any Chinese derived syllables maintain the spelling associated with the original Chinese character. This philosophy generally extends to preserving the spelling of verb stems as well. For an English analogy, in this approach "paid" would be spelled "payed" (preserving the verb stem "pay") even if it ends up being pronounced closer to "paid" than "pay ed", "driving" would be spelled "driveing", etc. As an extreme version of the decoupling, you could imaging spelling "went" as "goed" but still pronouncing it "went", though Korean never goes this far to my knowledge. You often have to use the meaning of the word to properly spell it. It's not a 1:1 correspondence between spelling and pronunciation.
Korean consonants are trickier than they seem, because their pronunciations vary depending on where they are in the word. Also, many of these pronunciations don't exist in English. I'm guessing your issue is mainly with ㄱ/ㅋ, ㄷ/ㅌ, ㅂ/ㅍ, ㅈ/ㅊ. If you're trying to use the typical transliteration scheme that maps ㄱ/ㄷ/ㅂ/ㅈ to g/d/b/j, you'll have a hard time because in some situations they will sound closer to k/t/p/ch. Luckily the rules are generally pretty regular:
Depending on the context ㄱ can have roughly four sounds: G/K hybrid (may feel like ㅋ but subtly different), GG (essentially same as ㄲ), G, or K' (essentially same as ㄲ or ㅋ, depending on the context).
ㄷ/ㅌ, ㅂ/ㅍ, ㅈ/ㅊ follow by analogy for D/T, B/P, J/Ch respectively.
Don't even bother with trying to get the true ㄹ sound unless you learned Korean or Japanese from a young age. I'm convinced it's one of the most unintuitive sounds in the world for an English speaker. It's like halfway between an American "R" and "L" but leans more "R" at the beginning of a syllable and more "L" at the end of a syllable. Just using American "R" and "L" in that way is probably as close as most can get.
Never had this issue but I might not be understanding what you mean. Do you have example sentences where this happens?
"뭐하고 있어요?" was the correct answer, and What I heard was "어호이새여"
"지금 좀 바빠요" was the correct answer, and what I heard was "치감전파패요"
This was purely a sounds to writing test, and I don't know enough words in Korean to know what the characters meant, meaning I didn't have the context of whether the characters made sense together or not. I literally questioned my sanity after seeing the correct answers. Apparently in the first example, I missed an entire character being pronounced.
Some of those are because of the more advanced rules/exceptions that I mentioned, and @bonsaii listed some above:
The others... I don't know, there might be rules I don't know, but I think you just need more listening practice. It's hard. But you're not going insane, they just don't follow the simple pronounciation guides in the intro hangul guides quite as neatly as they make it seem.
this is a good list of rules. But you certainly don't need to know all of these when you're a beginner, or even any of them at all. Just.... be aware that they exist.
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It seems unintuitive because it's two different sounds: at the start of a syllable it's a tapped r like in Spanish and at the end of a syllable it's more or less the same as the English l. Native speakers consider it one sound because there's only one letter for it, the same way English speakers think of the voiceless th at the start of "think" and the voiced th at the start of "then" as the same sound because they're written the same.
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Heh, yeah. I found learning Korean a very frustrating experience. They love to talk about how their hangul system is so scientific and simple, but native speakers don't understand how all the similar sounds and homonyms make it difficult for foreign learners. The pronounciation is tough, no way around that, and it's not always consistent. I've had some people tell me that 애 and 에 sound exactly the same, while others tell me that there's a subtle difference or that it's a regional dialect. I can't be sure.
(also, in case you haven't learned this yet, a lot of them change their sound depending on what comes before or after them. Nobody told me that in my intro Korean class)
Probably the best advice is not sweat the details too much, just push through until you know a lot more and then you'll get it from context. Nobody expects you as a beginner to be able to transcribe it perfectly. But realize that you're trying to do something difficult and it will take a lot of time and effort.
Now this one I do know about. 애 and 에 merged in the speech of hip youngsters in Seoul in the 80s and it has spread to the rest of the country in proportion to how much one interacts with that crowd, similar to how the cot-caught merger is spreading among young Americans due to the cultural influence of California.
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I mean, when you come from East Asia, Korean must seem like simplicity itself. Any alphabet, however flawed, is better than Chinese, which is a collection of 20,000 logograms so disconnected from any pronunciation that two completely different spoken languages like Mandarin and Cantonese can use it as their writing system, or Japanese, which is a monstrosity made up of two different syllabaries, one of which is used primarily to write fucked-up English, plus another 2,000 logograms stolen from Chinese which can be pronounced in two different ways (the Chinese way and the Japanese way).
That's what most people say, but i've found it's a bit more nuanced than that.
Chinese characters are certainly hard for foreigners to learn, but they work quite well for Chinese or any language based on it. So anyone from any sort of Chinese dialect can look at those written charaters and know exactly what they mean, even if they dont know the pronounciation. Or at least, they could until Mao messed it up with his stupid "simplified Chinese" that randomly removes strokes. They will also instantly know the meaning of most Japanese Kanji too, without any extra effort. The hiragana in Japanese mostly just fills in the grammar words like verb conjugations, so it's easy to separate.
This used to be the case in Korean too, but then they abruptly removed all the Chinese characters. So now there's no clear boundaries between words, verbs have like 1000 particle endings with no direct translation in English, and everything has 10 different homonyms since the characters and tones got lost. You pretty much have to know the entire sentence and context to know what any specific word means. At least you know the pronounciation... sort of... assuming you know all the little details and exceptions they don't teach you at the start.
this is maybe more ranty than i intended. Korean really is a difficult language though.
It was not Mao’s effort, and you should not give him credit for it. Since the beginning of the New Culture Movement, scholars had already been considering the simplification of Chinese characters as a way to improve literacy. Some radicals even wanted to abolish Chinese characters altogether, similar to what Vietnam eventually did. The Nationalists also had their own versions of simplified characters before the Communists (RoC’s Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the US, Hu Shih, is one of the most prominent supporter of reforming the Chinese language), although these efforts met with strong opposition. Japanese too have simplified some Chinese characters (some even borrowed by the communists later). All of these movements eventually culminated in the Simplified Chinese.
Most simplified characters have roots in Caoshu or Xingshu. Because of their cursive nature, these scripts naturally reduce and merge strokes. Scholars who are tasked to simplify Chinese mostly do not make up new characters. There are a few abominations that are created entirely after the Communists took power and makes no sense, but overwhelmingly, simplified characters predate Mao, some of them by centuries, even millennia.
Also only ~20% of Chinese characters have been simplified, and a majority of them (I would guess 60% probably) are only mildly simplified and easily recognizable by traditional Chinese speakers.
Ah, interesting, thanks for the context! Yeah i've never formally studied that history, so I probably got a lot of details wrong. Probably when I heard that "Mao mangled it" I was thinking of what you said "a few abominations that are created entirely after the Communists took power and makes no sense," but it still works quite well as an international language/alphabet.
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I've come across similar complaints from Korean learners on various language forums in the past, but I don't know it well enough to directly address your issue. What I would suggest generally is identifying a set of minimal pairs in Korean containing whichever consonants you find troublesome, pulling audio files of native speakers reading those words from Forvo, and then attaching those mp3 files to an Anki deck so you can do spaced repetition exercises and train your ear on those particular sounds.
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