learning journal 4

[Yewon Son]

The Korean alphabet consists of 10 vowels and 14 consonants, many of which have sounds that are completely unique to the Korean language. While the language itself is a historically easy language to learn, gaining fluency in the language is extremely difficult because of how different certain sounds in it are from the English language. In particular, vowels like yeo and euh are difficult to pronounce correctly, especially in sentences, because they don't have an exact translation through English phonetics. For example, the word "yeo-ja" which means woman in Korean, is easily mispronounced because the first yeo sound isn't pronounced exactly as the english phonetic transcription would describe it to be. Besides certain difficult, unique sounds, the sound system of Korean as a whole makes the language itself fairly easy to learn because the sounds of the written words correlate with each other. The written language was designed to adhere as closely as possible to the actual sound of the words when spoken. One of the most useful tools I found for discriminating different sounds and producing them in Korean, was to simply watch and listen to native speakers. Because of modern technology with free, easily accessible online platforms like Youtube, finding segments of variety tv shows or Korean dramas where one can listen to native speakers is both plausible and easy. In order to advance my grasp on these skills, I would use these platforms to listen to native speakers, and try to mimic the exact sounds they made as closely as possible until I am able to produce the sounds on my own.