What is the difference between sound and spelling? Why is this distinction significant for your language-learning efforts? Describe the phonetic inventory of your target language. Are there sounds in your language that don’t exist in American English? If so, provide several words and their phonetic transcriptions of words as examples to support your argument. What do you need to know about the sound system of your target language? How will you acquire the ability to discriminate differentiated segments in your listening, and to produce these sounds in your speech?
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While both sound and spelling are important cornerstones of language, sound is more in the vocalized, auditory scope such as pronunciation while spelling is more visual and uses the alphabet or characters of a language. This distinction is significant because it is important to address both sound and spelling in language learning and know the best techniques for learning each of them. For me, since I am more of an auditory learner, spelling is something I have to work more on because sound comes more naturally to me.
A difference between Korean sounds and English sounds is that in Korean, two consonant characters are often stuck together in a word and make a single sound. This sound is more tense and stressed than the single consonant and does not have an English phonetic counterpart. For example, ㅈ is the single character and ㅉ is the double. While ㅈ is phonetically transcripted as [ts], a voiceless alveolar affricate, ㅉ uses a transcription that doesn’t exist in english: “ts͈”. It is important to differentiate the difference between these two sounds made by the same characters. There is also a similar process with vowels where 아 makes an “ah” [a] sound and 야 is the diphthong version of 아 making more of an “ee-yah” sound and is important to note when learning Korean. This common dipthong looks like [j] and is common in a couple of languages but not in English. I will acquire the ability to discriminate differentiated segments in Korean by studying the phonetic chart more and learning more about the phonetic background of words I already know how to say. This may help me apply those phonetic transcriptions to other words I don’t know how to pronounce.
Sound is the vibrations emitted from the manipulation of our vocal cords and spelling is the written form of words used to communicate. The difference between spoken words and its spelling is that it is not a direct transcription of what the pronunciation should be. This is significant to my korean language-learning efforts because a lot of the hangul characters do not perfectly correlate with sounds found in the latin alphabet. This in turn, makes it difficult to read words when I am associating the character sounds to be an "in-between" sound. One prime example of this is the rieul character ㄹ - it is pronounced somewhere between an R and L sound. A word that ends in this challenging character is 물 which means water and is romanized as [mul] and [mur]. This lack of coordination of the romanization goes to prove how there is no finite way of romanizing the korean sound to someone learn from a latin-alphabet.
I need to know that certain ending consonants will become silenced and instead will take the sound of the following character. For example, the verb "to be" is "있다" which translates to the pronunciation of [eess dah] yet ends up being pronounced [itda]. Apparently, any alveolar ending sound will take the "unreleased" sound of the following stop character.
I will continue to work on pronounciation with my language partner and learn how to utilize the necessary vocal cords to prounce korean more accurately.
Spelling is the representation of sound, and it varies from language to language (as well as between dialects.) The IPA is the closest approximation to sound as spelling that we use to compare and analyze different languages. Bahasa Indonesia is a very phonetic language with pronunciation being easily predictable. There are a few phonetic sounds in Indonesian that are hard for me to produce, and I've been doing more reading aloud with my language partner to practice them. For example, the 'r' sound is a tap produced slightly further to the front of the palate than the Spanish trilled 'r.' Some of the vowels, particularly 'o' are more rounded, so words like "pekerjaan" are hard for me to pronounce. Although my listening comprehension is decent, I'm trying to continue pronunciation practice with fine tuning alongside my community partner.
Assignment%20oct%201.pdf
Sound travels through the air and must be produced, in this case by vocal cords. Spelling can be down by hand or electronically, and in both cases needs a physical medium like a computer screen or paper to be seen. This is important to understand because spelling and speaking are essential skills for mastering a language.
Korean has many of the same sounds as English, with a few differences. The ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds in remarkable and lotus do not exist in Korean. Instead, Korean feature a more retroflexed ‘r’ sound similar to that in Spanish.
Example:
/ɾ/
바람 baram
[paɾam]
'wind' or 'wish'
Certain Korean consonants can sound identical to the untrained ear. For instance, an English speaker may have trouble differentiating between the following:
/p͈/
뿔 ppul
[p͈ul]
'horn'
/pʰ/
풀 pul
[pʰul]
'grass' or 'glue'
Both feature a ‘p’ sound, but the Korean word for grass has a p sound that is pronounced with more air being pushed out.
It is important to understand sounds in the Korean language in order to speak it fluently, especially since many sounds do not exist in English. Due to frequent exposure to Korean, I am able to accurately differentiate different sounds in Korean, but I will need to practice speaking in Korean in order to learn how to consistently produce these different sounds.
One of the things that I think is so cool about Korean is that characters in Hangeol often look like the shape that your mouth makes when producing those sounds. A fun visual representation of phonetics.
Sound is a word in its audible form and a spelling is a word in its written/printed form. This distinction for me is significant because both sound and spelling are essential to learning a language and utilizing it properly to build fluency or functionality. The 2 types of communication are essential for a language learner if they desire to actually fully understand themselves in that language. Only knowing one way of communication will not be helpful in certain situations and one must learn to comprehend both to prepare for all types of challenges. There are vowel sounds that do not exist in the English language and there are certain consonants that do exist but its just the amount of intensity that does not exist in english. Korean characters are either stacked or side by side. For example, these first 2 characters are stacked and read from left to right.아 is a sound that doesn't exist. It has the same sound as ahhh. 니is not a challenging syllable and has the sound of a knee/ni. The next syllables are stacked read from top to bottom. 요 sounds like yo as in I in spanish or the colloquial yo. 는 This stacked syllable would sound like neun which is hard since the middle horizontal line doesn’t exactly have a sound that can be formed with the english alphabet. The main challenges of the sounds In korean is the amount of air utilized during consonant pronunciation and In my plan to learn to detect and create the different yet similar sounds I will try to accommodate my ears and mouth by listening to more Korean media or Korean English bilingual shows
If I were asked to define “sound” in simple terms, I would describe it as some kind of energy waves that travel through air and are the main objective for hearing. “Spelling”, on the other hand, is the process of arranging the speech into written language. Even though sounds are technically part of our everyday speech, when we do sound-spelling we do not necessarily focus on the individual sounds, we organize the speech into syllables. The English alphabet has 26 letters but 44 sounds. My target language - Hungarian, has 44 letters (40 consonants, and 14 vowels), and 39 sounds (25 consonant phonemes, and 14 vowel phonemes). It is very important to be able to differentiate different sounds from each other because this drastically affects the writing abilities and the correct spelling of the words.
The Hungarian language is the 4-top hardest language in the whole world because it has a very complex sound structure - it is a very vocal language. As I said earlier, Hungarian has 14 vowels: seven short vowels (a, e, i, o, ö, u, ü) and seven long ones, which are written with an acute accent in the case of á, é, í, ó, ú, and with the double acute in the case of ő, ű. It is very challenging to hear the difference between the long and short vowels, and it is definitely something that comes with practice. For example, in order to produce the short vowels (a, e, i, o, ö, u, ü) one has to form their mouth in a circle with a vertical direction, in other words - beak-shape. On the other hand, in order to produce accurate long vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú & ő, ű) one has to shape their mouth in a circle but with a horizontal direction. For example, the word “barát” which means “friend” has both types of vowels - short (a) and long (á). In English, both of them would sound the same but in Hungarian, this word’s transcription looks like this - [ˈbɒraːt], and is a clear example it is very important to keep an eye on the distinction between vowels in Hungarian.
Other examples are:
Szálloda [ˈsaːlːodɒ] - hotel;
Tanár [ˈtɒnaːr] - teacher;
Szemüveg [ˈsɛmyvɛɡ] - glasses.
You can see that it is crucial the way you shape your mouth while pronouncing these words. And even though it is extremely hard to pick up the differences between the vowels, it is one of the first things that one should learn about Hungarian. Every time I study Hungarian, I incorporate audio, and listening exercises into my learning process. From time to time I watch kids' cartoons on YouTube, focus specifically on the vowels, and try to differentiate between short and long.