Not many people understand that there’s a difference between speaking/sound vs spelling. In English, the way you spell things is sometimes nowhere near the way it sounds when you speak it. A “word” we went over in class was “ghoti”, which with a bit of tweaking can be pronounced “fish”. Korean on the other hand is slightly more friendly. The language was designed and made based on the sounds that the characters would sound like. Because of this the way the word is spelled, is essentially the same as it sounds. However, there are many sounds/characters that are commonly very difficult to pronounce for people who didn’t grow up speaking the language. These are the “double consonants”: ㄲㄸㅃㅆㅉ. They all sound similar to g, d, b, s, j/z but they have a much stronger cut off and stress. For example, ㄲ is more similar to a k, but the beginning of the letter sounds like a g.
Hopefully there won’t be any difficulty learning Korean especially since I grew up listening to my parents speak it all the time. I think I will be able to reciprocate the same sounds for each character fairly easily. The only difficulty comes when incorporating them into writing, since there are so many characters that sound the same, such as ㅐ and ㅔ which both sound like ä. There are so double consonants not mentioned above that combine ㄹㅎ, which makes the ㅎ carry over to the next syllable. When speaking however, these differences are very minimal or even none.
