In class, we talked about articulatory phonetics and how sounds turn into speech. Sounds was defined as vibrations that go through a medium. Every language has a unique way of pronouncing letters and words by producing unique sounds. The way sound is produced varies as there are multiple organs that are involved in phonetic articulation. In simple terms, sound is utilized and modified to spell and pronounce in speech in languages.
This distinction is important in Korean because there are consonants in English that don’t exist in Korean as well as vowels in Korean that don’t exist in English. For example, the Korean alphabet doesn’t have a “f”, so for certain words, Korean replaces “f” with “ㅍ” which has a “p” sound because that is the closest consonant that sounds or is pronounced closest to “f”. Another example would be “ㄸ”. “ㄸ” is pronounced “tt” which doesn’t exist in the Enlgish alphabet. For vowels, English only has “a”, “u”, “o”, “i”, and “e”. Korean has vowels that combine English consonants with a vowel such as “ㅖ” , which is pronounced “ye”. Being able to properly pronounce Korean characters are crucial as there are many words that sound the same or similar, and it comes down to the slightest difference in pronunciation to differentiate words and meaning. For example, I said that “ㅖ” is vowel pronounced “ye”. However, “ㅒ” is another vowel that is pronounced “yae” and it sounds very similar when being used in speech, almost identical. So, you have to be very careful when speaking so that you can properly convey what you are trying to say.
Koreans has a wider variety of obstruction but less segments. In order to discriminate differentiated segments and obstruction, I feel like you just have to read the alphabet and transcribe the pronunciations then practice producing the sounds to pronounce each character to truly understand and master it. Once all that has been done, you can start to learn words and really discriminate differentiated segments and obstruction.
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