I would describe the phonetic inventory to be fairly simple. There are 14 basic consonants and 10 basic vowels, so the Korean alphabet is technically shorter than the English alphabet. There are a few English letters that do not explicitly exist in Korean– c, f, q, v, w, x, y, and z. However, these sounds can be imitated, although it will sound a little different. For example, the hard use of [c] in Korean would be translated as ㅋ in Korean, which is actually [k]. However, Korean does have ㅊ, which produces a [ch] sound. Another example is [f], which is actually pronounced as [p] in the Korean language. The most difficult sound in the Korean language is ㄹ, which I would describe as a cross between [l] and [r].
Although I am now fluent in English, I grew up learning Korean first and I personally think that English is a much more difficult language. There are a lot of sounds that are difficult to make, whereas Korean is composed of mostly plosives. Since I speak Korean at home, I have noticed that I develop some sort of an accent whenever I say English words when speaking Korean. In contemporary Korea, there is a lot of English that is incorporated into their everyday language, and sounds that exist in English but not in Korean, like [f] as mentioned above, are pronounced in said Korean accent. I am not terrible at speaking but as I have said before, I am not the most confident speaker so I would like to improve speaking more clearly and articulating my words. I do not think that I will particularly struggle with this aspect of my learning since I speak Korean pretty regularly and the phonetics are simpler, but there is definitely room for improvement.
Comments