The difference between sound and spelling is that sound is an airstream, something that relies on your voice and different parts of your mouth, to form words. Spelling is the visual representation of the words using different letters. This distinction would be significant for my language learning efforts because in Korean, many words, especially when connected to certain words, are pronounced differently than what they seemed to be spelled as. In Korean, there are 7 vowels and 19 consonants.
There are many phonemes in English that are not found in Korean, like “f”, “v”, and “w”. The sound of F, in words like coffee, would be pronounced using the consonant “P” (sounds like Ko-pi). The sound of V and C (which sounds similar to a k), in a name like Vicky, would be pronounced using consonants “b”\“p” and “k”, respectively, like Bi-ki. Other words that contain the letters, like Victoria would be biktoria, TV would be tibi. For the letter w, Korean doesn’t have one equivalent consonant in Korean, but it is rather created by different combinations of vowels.
To learn the Korean sound system, I need to understand how consonants differ in aspiration and tension for words with ㄱ (a sound between g and k), ㅋ (hard k), and ㄲ (like the first but a little more stress on the pronouncation). I also need to pay attention to liaison rules, where the final consonant of one syllable may shift in pronunciation when followed by another syllable.
To acquire the ability to both discriminate and produce these sounds, I’ll use a mix of active listening and speaking practice. For listening, I can train with similar consonants pairs like 가 (ga) versus 까 (gga). For speaking, I’ll practice mimicking native audio, adjusting what my mouth should be like until the differences feel natural. Recording myself and comparing it with native pronunciation will also help me hear mistakes I might miss otherwise.
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