I’ve been really happy with the progress I’ve made so far in my language learning! I believe that I nearly have the basics down for the Korean alphabet (also known as Hangul). I started with learning the consonants, then the vowels, and then finally the double consonants and double vowels. Learning the consonants was a lot easier for me as many of the sounds are similar to the sounds of certain letters in English. However, learning the vowels was trickier as I had to make sounds that I am not familiar with in English, particularly the “eu” and “eo” vowel sounds since it’s kinda like having to use the “e” and “u/o” sounds in English combined together in one cohesive form. The best way I can explain it is that I can make the “e” and “u” sounds separately perfectly fine in English, but it creates a new sound having to combine both of those sounds into one. I also thought the double consonants were confusing at first, but then I realized it has a sharper articulation compared to the other consonants. I always feel weird trying to pronounce them because I feel like I’m sounding very aggressive or like shouting as I attempt to really articulate the sounds. For example, when pronouncing the character giyeok (ㄱ) which has a “g” sound, I would pronounce it as “gaaa…” vs the double consonant as “ga!”. After getting these foundations down, my language partner and I have worked on putting together these phonemes to learn how to pronounce them when they are combined together. For example, when I first learned the characters for the consonants, I didn’t know that in Korean you wouldn’t say the alphabet by pronouncing the name of the character, so I wouldn’t say giyeok (ㄱ) to say the “g” sound of the alphabet, but you would combine it with one of the vowel endings. So when saying the alphabet to a native speaker, I would use a vowel ending such as a (ㅏ) for each consonant sound like this: 가 to make the sound “gah”.
I still have some work to do with combining phonemes to make different sounds, so after I am proficient in this I will work on making words and then learning to construct sentences! It has honestly been so exciting and fun seeing my progress, and I’m surprised at how much I really know when my language partner assesses me. I tried to use Duolingo at first to accomplish my learning goals, but then I realized that the beginning of the lessons didn’t really have a structure that really made sense. For example, in the alphabet section it incorporated basic random vocabulary words like “girl” and “this”, and that really threw me off as I mainly wanted to just review the vowels and consonants. I’ve found the resources that my language learning partner has shared with me to be most helpful; Jannette sends me websites, videos, and visual diagrams that are relevant to the topic we are learning so I spend most of my time outside lessons utilizing those, along with KoreanClass101.com. I also hope to incorporate other resources such as Mango and to watch YouTube videos more often to help train my ears more to better recognize distinct sounds in Korean. In addition, I hope to integrate more learning about Korean culture in my lessons with my language partner so I can learn something new each week and to apply what I’m learning to make connections between language and culture.
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