For the Korean language, there are sounds that do not exist in American English. Take ㄹ for example. This consonant sounds like something between a ‘r’ or an ‘l’. Additionally, depending on the positioning of this letter in a character, it may tend towards either side. I don’t see any character like this in American English. According to Wikipedia, the closest approximation of this sound is the ‘l’ in ‘alike’. The phonetic transcription of this character is a l (voiced alveolar lateral approximant). When I was first learning this character, I tried to use my experience with English to pronounce it but after working with my language partner; I learned that despite it sounding very simple, using the tongue in such a manner is difficult. The ㄹcharacter was also pronounced as a stop sometimes as well depending on the word. One example of this is the word 잘 가, or goodbye. By placing the ㄹ as the pedestal of the character 잘, the sound abruptly stops by pushing the tongue against the roof of the mouth.
The sound system of Hangul is very similar to American English in that words are pronounced exactly as they are written left to right. The majority of the time this is true and there are no issues but one aspect of Hangul that I have been delving into is the subtleties of the Korean syntax. The position of certain letters can greatly affect how the resulting sound will be. Certain combinations of letters cause certain sounds to be replaced by another and thus confusing the novice learner. Additionally, some phrases are shortened or have a certain character replaced in pronunciation for fluidity even though they are written and transcribed differently. Thus, the sound system of Korean is very much based on left to right syntax and comes naturally to many English speakers unlike Mandarin Chinese. One nice thing is that Hangul does not have any clicks or variations of clicks. If it did, the difficulty level of speaking Korean would skyrocket.
I will acquire the ability to discriminate differentiated segments and learn how to produce these natural sounds through practice. Frequently practicing the Korean alphabet as well as common words that may utilize different grammar rules will give me the experience necessary to do these. This will take a significant amount of time however, since I am just a novice at the moment. I do not think that using the IPA phonetic translations will be necessary at this moment since I will be even more confused trying to understand two different, though related, linguistic systems. With that being said, having some approximations back to English will be helpful in moments where muscle memory fails me. I have found a useful article on Wikipedia that highlights the IPA translations of Korean and provides an analysis of IPA pronunciations. This article points out the approximations that I need for Korean to English as demonstrated with the character ㄹat the beginning of this post.
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