discussion post #4

[Lehan Zhao]

The Korean sounds overlap mostly with English and Chinese which are the two languages that I am fluent in. Plus I had been listening to Korean language for almost six years. These experience that I have helps me be more natural at pronouncing Korean phonology. Comparing to English and Chinese, Korean language has much more vowels. Just like the example video we saw in class about the tribe, it is hard for me to distinguish two vowel sounds which are close to each other. When I was learning the alphabet, my language partner have to explicitly explain the difference between those sounds for me to hear it. There is one specific vowels that I have never encountered in my language learning process before which is the vowel ㅡ. Neither of the language I spoke have the sound produced by the glottis area. However, since I have been listening to this sound for year, it doesn’t take me long to get it. 그래 which has the closest meaning of “correct” in English. About my target language Korean, I have to practice more on the vowels pronunciation, especially with such subtle difference between each one. To achieve that I would have use the website suggested in class having the audio playing and words on the other side. Also it is important to be able to distinguish the vowels in writing because it might make a huge difference on the meaning of the word. In order to produce these sounds correctly, I would communicate with my language partner that we will arrange not only one class only on correcting my pronunciation but also correct me whenever I was saying things incorrect.