2018-09-23 03:35:03
Reason 3: Korean phonetics are a piece of cake for English speakers
For English speakers there’s nothing terribly unusual about Korean phonetics.
Unlike Arabic and Hebrew there are no guttural sounds.
There are no consonant clusters like Georgian or Polish (where you have 4 or more consonants in a row).
There are also no tones like many other East Asian languages.
For the most part Korean is usually pronounced exactly the way it’s written, unlike English which is full of words that sound nothing like the way they appear on paper.
The only exception to this is that like every language, Korean assimilates and omits sounds sometimes when combined with others.
This happens in pretty much every language though and is just an evolutionary process determined by what’s more comfortable for us to pronounce. Some letter combinations (e.g. putting n and l together) just don’t feel right when spoken.
Try saying nlion or nlight and you’ll see what I mean!
One example from Korean is 편리 which means convenience. It’s written pyeon-li but is pronounced pyeol-li where the n becomes an l sound. The latter is much easier to pronounce which is why these types of words evolve over time in every language.
As another example, 맞다 (to be correct) is not pronounced maj-da as it’s written because that would be too awkward to say naturally so it’s pronounced ma’-da (a glottal stop in place of the j).
Don’t let these things concern you because these basic phonetic changes are easy to adjust to after a little practise and even more so when you understand why it happens.
967 views00:35
한
