The rules of pronunciation are extremely interesting and each country has its own unique rules. While the international phonetic alphabet is used in many languages around the world, Korean is the Roman sound, as is Japanese. Chinese is even more unique, using Pinyin for phonetic notation. As for the formation of Korean, Korean consonants and vowels are created according to the oral structure of human beings, the ancient Chinese thought of heaven, earth and human beings, and the theory of Yin and Yang. Such as ㄱ which like the shape of your tongue throat closed. ㄴ, like the shape of tongue attached palate. ㅁ, like the shape of mouth. ㅅ, like tooth profile. Guttural ㅇ, like pipes. At present, the Korean alphabet consists of 21 vowels and 19 consonants, which can be made into many syllables. It is simple and systematic, and can comprehensively record Korean speech. Korean text is made up of syllables, it's good for reading, but also creates a lot of homophones word, same spelling, such as "story", "temple", "ancient words", "leave" and "dead" are writing "고사". Therefore, the context must be used to determine the context.
I think the most important thing in learning Korean is the memory of word combination and the understanding of sentence. Because the difference mainly among Korean, Chinese, and English is that, for Chinese and English, each word has its own meaning. Many times, if you don't know one or two words in a sentence, you can still infer the meaning of the whole sentence from the words before and after the test. In Korean, however, mostly a word has different meanings in different sentences, so for the overall grasp and requires a high degree of semantic understanding.
Comments
Interesting post, Esme, but please be careful to avoid conflating sounds and spellings. When describing sounds, it's important to try to approximate the aural quality of the segment using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPA_chart_2018.pdf.