I taught my Chinese friends the structure and pronunciation of complicated vowels. As I mentioned in journal #4, I first taught them the eight basic vowels ㅏ = a, ㅓ = eo, ㅜ = u, ㅗ = o, ㅑ = ya, ㅕ = yeo, ㅠ = yu, ㅛ = yo. They did a pretty good job memorizing the basic vowels since these pronunciations are similar to the Chinese alphabetic system. However, it became more challenging when I introduced the complicated vowels: ㅜ + ㅣ = ㅟ = wi. ㅗ + ㅏ = ㅘ = wa. They could not just memorize the pronunciations like they did for the simple vowels because there could be so many different combinations of vowels. Not only did they need to figure out the pronunciation of each simple vowel in the complicated vowel, but they also needed to know the change of pronunciation when two vowels combine together. Some pronunciations might be eliminated when two vowels combine together and some pronunciations might change to some other similar ones. For example, ㅗ + ㅣ = ㅚ = oe , which sounds like “way”. Therefore, in order to master the Hangul system, memorization is not enough and we need to watch more TV shows and listen to more Korean dialogues to understand those idiomatic pronunciations.
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