The Korean alphabet -- Hangul, consists of 14 simple consonants and 6 simple vowels. The letters are combined together into syllable blocks. For example, Hangul is written: 한 (han) = ᄒ (h) + ᅡ (a) + ᄂ (n) and 글 (geul) = ᄀ (g) + ᅳ (eu) + ᄅ (l). When compared with American English, several English consonant sounds do not exist in Korean. The most significant of these are the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds in words such as “then”, “thirteen” and “clothes.” Additionally, there’s the /v/ sound, which is produced as a /b/ in Korean, and the /f/ sound, which leads to “phone” being pronounced “pone.”
Interestingly, you could also find trace of Chinese and English in modern Korean phrases. Because the Korean language borrowed some elements from both languages and adapted. I think it’s important to first learn the structure of Korean syllable blocks, as the sounds of some consonants change depending on whether they appear at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a syllable. It would be helpful to repeatedly listen to a native speaker reading a sentence, in order to gain a better idea of how to follow the sound structure.
Comments
Interesting post, Haley, 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.