According to the inventory provided by the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, Korean is made up of majority stop (plosive) consonants with bilabial, alveolar, palatal, velar, and glottal points of articulation. There are a couple of fricatives and two approximant and lateral approximant consonants. It’s interesting to know that the majority of consonants are plosive, and it also makes sense to me. Korean has a few double consonants (ㅃ [p*], ㅉ [tf*], ㄸ [t*], ㄲ [k*], ㅆ [s*] ; *=no symbol in IPA to indicate this) that I think are difficult to explain and to translate the sounds. It is noteworthy to mention that /r/ and /l/ in Korean phonology is interchangeable while in English, there is a clear difference. This difference is always something I find amusing when I type out English words in Korean. Both /r/ and /l/ are expressed by the consonant ㄹ. Because I’m not a beginner in learning my target language, I already have the ability to read and speak the phonetic differences of the language. I learned the different consonants and vowels as a child. The alphabet song (“가, 나, 다, 라, 마, 바, 사, 아, 자, 차, 카, 타, 파, 하”) was the basis of my Korean language knowledge. Being able to distinguish the different sounds and connecting the sounds to characters has helped my reading and writing despite the lack of formal Korean language education. Learning about the linguistical aspect of the language, however, will help me see the reason behind parts of Korean I just understood as is.
(Screen%20Shot%202020-02-16%20at%207.37.51%20PM.pngAttached image of Korean Phonetic Inventory)
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