Spelling is the symbols part of a language, how letters are used to represent a word. While sound is the physical way the word is spoken. For language learning, both are arguably important. The way a word is spelled cannot always tell you how it is pronounced, and vice versa. In Korean, my target language, spelling and sound are very closely related. The Hangul was made with phonetics in mind, meaning that one can usually figure out the pronunciation by the spelling of a word, and there are few exceptions. The words are even divided up by syllable blocks, meaning that just by the spelling one can tell how many syllables a word has and the sounds in each syllable. The Hangul has 24 letters in total, 14 consonants and 10 vowels. While most of the sounds in the hangul can be compared to English letters to some extent, there are certain sounds that do not exist in English. One of the hardest plain consonants for me personally is ㄹ, which is often described as sounding both like "r" and "l". To help my pronunciation, I focused on the placement of my tongue. While "r" and "l" don't seem like they have similar pronunciation, "l" is pronounced with the tongue in front of the top teeth, while "r" is pronounced with the tongue moved to the back near the throat. So, to pronounce a letter in between those two sounds, one can place the tongue on the hard palate. Another sound that doesn't exist in English is the doubled consonants. I compare these to accented letter in Spanish, as they don't change the sound by rather the stress placed on the syllable. Yet this can be easily confused with the "plosive" consonants, which indicates a stronger sound and more breathing out.
The only way to gain the ability to differentiate this sounds is through practice. In Korean I noticed that there is little change in tone and speed while they speak compared to the other languages I've learned, meaning it is easy for words to start to blend together.
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