The reading mainly talks about phones and also shows how human being’s body parts work in order to make the sound. According to the reading, essential for communication by sound is an airstrip which is created by the compression of the lungs. And there are four articulators called laryngeal, dorsal, coronal and labial in our body. Also, we have eight places of articulator which are glottal, pharyngeal, uvular, velar, palatal, alveolar, dental and labial. The article also mentions the phones of English on several parts such as English consonants, English vowels and obstruent and sonorants. In my opinion, Korean sound system is really different with American English. The Korean alphabet has 10 vowels and 14 consonants and a great number of them are really unique to the Korean language. At the same time, a lot of English sounds do not exist in Korean. For example, the “v” sound is pronounced as “b” sound in Korean. Take “visual” as an instance, Korean people pronounce it as “bisual”.
Secondly, when I learned Korean in class, I realized a lot of special things I need to know about Korean sound system. For instance, the “k” and “g” sounds really similar in Korean. Before I write the word down and my teacher tell me I write it wrong, I don’t know that the word bag is actually pronounced as “gabang” instead of “kabang”. This happened a lot during my class and make me realize that I really need to improve my ability to discriminate differentiated segments in my listening and to produce these sounds in my speech. In order to achieve my goal, I will listen to native speaker a lot by watching drama or using the tool on the website and try to mimic the exact sounds that they pronounce. Moreover, in my class, I will write down the word once I heard it. I believe these are able to help me distinguish the different sounds in Korean.
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