Describe the phonetic inventory of your target language. Are there sounds in your language that don't exist in English? Provide several phonetic transcriptions of important words.
What do you need to know about the structure of your target language? How will you acquire the knowledge you need? Have you identified resources and textbooks to promote your task-based objectives? Why or why not?
There are many sounds in Korean that do not exist in English and some even in Chinese. The Korean language adopts Hangul System which is composed of 14 consonants and 6 vowels. It is a syllable timed language which means that each individual word stress is not emphasized when speaking. Pronunciations such as double consonants in Korean ( ㄲ,ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ) do not have exact sounds in English. For example,ㄲ is pronounced as /k͈/ which is similar to /k/ in English but with a stiff glottal opening. One common word can be 까치, which means magpie in English. Some other examples of phonetic transcriptions in Korean can be: 오빠 /oppa/ (Elder brother of a female); 누나 /nuna/ (Elder sister of a male); 동생 /dongsaeng/ (younger sibling).
In terms of the Korean language structure, it is very similar to the structure of Japanese. The word structure is composed of consonants and vowels, and the sentence structure is either subject + verb or subject + object + verb. In order to quickly master the the formation of sentence structure, I mainly learn Korean by comparing with that in Japanese to understand the meaning behind the simple usage. For the learning resources, I found both the textbook (Integrated Korean Beginning) and workbook useful as a systematic way of studying Korean. Besides that, I really enjoy using online resources and platforms such as HiNative and the Chinese language study website ‘Hujiang’. A lot of questions can be directly answered by the native speakers on HiNative. Also, Korean tutorial videos on YouTube are also helpful for me to explore various cultural concepts and current hot topics.
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