Korean has series of oral stops (sounds like English p, b, t, d, k and g), affricates (sounds like English ch and j) and fricatives (sounds like English s and z), but there are differences between them. Definitely, one series (ㅂㄷㅈㅅㄱ) is unvoiced and unaspirated (sometimes called ‘plain’ or ‘lax’), another (ㅍ ㅌ ㅊ ㅋ) is unvoiced and aspirated. I personally don’t worry about this a lot. Because my native language is Chinese, and a lot of sounds in that are hard for native English speakers actually have similar or same sounds in Chinese. I feel that if I use the sounds in Chinese correctly, it can help me avoid a lot of hard pronunciations in Korean.
You need to be a member of The SDLAP Ning to add comments!
Replies
Interesting post, Lanqin, but please be careful to avoid conflating sound and spelling. Letters are not sufficient to represent sound. When describing sounds, it's important to try to approximate the associated aural qualities using transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPA_chart_2018.pdf. Also, phones are usually indicated with brackets. More on these topics on Friday.