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.
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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?
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.
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's exactly the same sentiment as the ones saying "Bolsheviks mangled Russian spelling" have. Both countries had 10% literacy and the reforms devised to make reading and writing more accessible were designed under the old regime to improve this abysmal state of affairs. In both cases they were rejected by the already literate classes in charge and were implemented only after the civil wars had been won by the more radical sides.
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