Korean is as foreign as a foreign language can get. No roman alphabet and unusual sounds can make learning Korean intimidating. The Korean language has lots of different inflections, variations and subtle differences. Koreans living in the south like the city, Daegu, speak differently than those that live in the north in the city, Seoul. The language has doubled consonants that can make the difference between the words for “bronze” and the word for “poop.” Difficulties put aside, you can learn to speak and write Korean proficiently.
The Korean alphabet system called Hangul is easy to learn quickly and the subtleties come with practice. Each Korean letter (called jamo) represents a sound. Learn what characters represent what sound by mastering the alphabet by learning the consonants and vowels.
Listen to the language all the time and learn how to pronounce the alphabet. Korean is very irregular and the only way one can learn is to constantly listen to how the language sounds.
Korean is a subject-object-verb language. At first this can be confusing, for English is a subject-verb-object language.
Korean: I Lisa Love
English: I Love Lisa
Just remember in Korean the verb usually goes at the end of the sentence. If you are around Korean speaking people you might have caught the phrase “eem-needa” at the end of sentences.
Hangul is written in a block structure. Consonants and vowels form blocks of syllables that combine to make words. If you have a Korean keyboard installed on your computer it automatically starts forming blocks. These can be sometimes annoying to redo if you make a typo for you have to erase the whole block of text.
The Korean alphabet is called Hangul. Unlike Chinese, Hangul characters represent sounds.
In this article we are going to discuss the korean consonants. Consonants are called “jaum.”
To learn how to read, write, and speak Korean it is essential that you have a strong grasp of Hangul.
For simplicity we are going to only discuss the consonants.
Here are the consonants:
ㄱ sounds like “g” and sometimes “k”
ㄴ sounds like “n”
ㄷ sounds like “d” and sometimes “t”
ㄹ sounds like “l” and sometimes “r”
ㅁ sounds like “m”
ㅂ sounds like “b”
ㅇ sounds like the preceding vowel (this is called the null consonant, more on that below)
ㅅ sounds like “s” and sometimes “sh”
ㅈ sounds like “j”
ㅊ sounds like “ch”
ㅋ sounds like “k” ( ㅋㅋㅋ is the korean version of LOL)
ㅌ sounds like “t”
ㅍ sounds like “p”
ㅎ sounds like “h”
Memorize these consonants. The consonants can have a different sound than what is written above as you can
see by the explanation.
Dont stress out to much on this, Korean is a subtle language with a decent amount of variation. For example ㄱ
sounds like a mixture of the “g” sound and the “k” sound. The Null Consonant: ㅇ takes the sound of the
vowel that comes after it because a vowel can not stand alone in the Korean writing system.
Now What?
Hangul is structured around the syllabic block system. in this system, a syllable block has a lead consonant a vowel and sometimes an end consonant or an end vowel. You combine these syllable blocks to form words.
Here is an example: 바보
This example, pronounced “pabo” is formed with two syllable blocks with two parts each. It means silly.
From here one should proceed to learn the korean vowels. See the website for more information: korean lessons
If you want to jump into your first Korean conversation check out: Free Korean tutorials
Fetch pragmatic knowledge in the sphere of Numis Network review – make sure to go through this web page. The time has come when proper information is truly only one click of your mouse, use this possibility.
