Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 254
- 1
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link