I’m feeling especially excited to write this post because this week we had our first real lesson on Korean. Since my first goal is to be able to memorize the Korean alphabet, my instructor introduced the Korean consonants and vowels this week.
She used charts that displayed both characters and went through its name, how to pronounce it, and any other important information about them. For instance, for the Korean consonant “ㅇ” (pronounced “i-ʉɴ”) it has two sounds. The first “sound” is that is has no sound and is often paired in front of vowels to indicate that that character of the word is pronounced by its used vowel. For example, the vowel “ㅏ” (pronounced “a”) but in Korean, vowels cannot stand alone by itself—it is always paired with some consonant. Therefore, for the vowel to be pronounced as its sound, there needs to be the consonant “o” placed in front of the vowel. The second sound is that it forms the “-ing” sound at the end of words like in the word 빵 (pronounced “paɴ”) which means bread. That’s also why you see them usually placed as the bottom character just like how you would see “-ing” at the end of gerunds in English words.
For the vowels, they were pretty straight forward in its pronunciation. Another easy tip to remember for vowels, is if they have two horizontal lines like in “ㅕ” or “ㅑ” or “ㅠ” or “ㅛ” they have the letter “y” pronunciation in front of the sound it would normally make if there wasn’t an extra horizontal line. It was also convenient that the only two words I knew how to read or write was my name 신상아 (pronounced “ʂin-saɴ-a”) and 우유 (pronounced “u-ʎu”) which means milk. So the only two words I knew how to read and write were able to be used to exemplify the two rules for the “ㅇ” consonant and the horizontal line tip for the vowels.
That was the majority of the lesson because we can’t move forward until I, at least, have the Korean alphabet down. But once I have the alphabet down, then I’ll be able to slowly start to read words because I’ll know how to pronounce the characters.
To work on what I learned on my own I have been writing down the alphabet as I say it out loud, to work on my writing skills as well as retain the pronunciation for each word. In the past, I’d always forget what consonants meant what and they would all end up blurring together. This is why when I look at Korean they all just look like lines and circles to me. So, to make sure that doesn’t happen again, I repeatedly write down the alphabet. If I were to forget some consonant or vowel, I would go back and write it down multiple times and spell out its pronunciation and continuously repeat it back to myself. For some reason I kept forgetting “ㅌ” (pronounced “ti-ʉt”) and “ㅍ” (pronounced “pi-ʉp”) and “ㅎ” (pronounced “hi-ʉt”). To help me memorize them, I formed connected its appearance to its sound. For example, “ㅍ” has the letter “p” sound. To me it looks like the mathematical pi sign, therefore it has a “p” sound.
Replies