Vertical montiors, Vim, and late-night programming.
And coffee.
Yum.
Korean Numbers & Counters Learning Tool
I spent yesterday evening hacking up a page to help when learning Korean numbers and counters. It provides a random number and counter combination, and asks the user to fill in the correct answer. It’s still rough around the edges, but it has a few options to customise learning.
Writing something you yourself want to use is always the best motivation for programming projects. I’ve been using it all morning and it’s helping so far!
매일 vs 맨날
매일
- 毎日, “ever day”
- Comes from kanji so more formal meaning
- Used in written stuff like essays
- More formal than 맨날 but can still use it in speaking
맨날
- “All the time” feeling
- Korean expression, not kanji-based
- Informal
- Mostly spoken but can use in informal online situations (Twitter)
- Don’t write it in an essay
I don’t know if I’ll write more of these about Korean in the future.
Korean Pronunciation for British English Speakers
Most online guides and books feature simple introductions to Korean pronunciation based on English words. The trouble with these guides is that they’re written from an American perspective. The same words pronounced by a British English speaker will sound totally different and actually make it harder for you to be understood in Korean.
Before diving into the examples I want to say that at first learning from English examples is OK, but when learning a foreign language significantly different to your own, it’s invaluable to know the International Phonetic Alphabet, or at least the subset of the phonemes that occur in your target language. In this case, the Wikipedia page on Korean Phonology is the best place to start. I’ll put the IPA symbols for the Korean vowels alongside so this should help.
Finally two important points: this guide is based on southern “BBC English”, also known as “Queen’s English”. Also I am still only a beginner in Korean so please get a native speaker to check your pronunciation.
Two “A”s and “O”
- ㅏ ‘cat’ /a/
- ㅓ ‘cart’ /ɘ/ or /ʌ/
- ㅗ ‘cot’ /o/
I think it’s best to consider these first 3 vowels together as they are very close and it’s best to discuss their similarities and differences together.
ㅏ is a harder harsher sound sound as in ‘cat’ or ‘flap’. Whereas ㅓ is the more round sound as in ‘cart’ or ‘far’. I found it easy to remember that the right-facing ㅏ was a hard sound as in “attack” and the left-facing ㅓ as the slightly softer sounding of the two.
The difference between ㅏ and ㅓ is present within British English. Consider the difference between northern and southern English pronunciation of ‘grass’ and ‘glass’. In the north they are generally pronounced with a hard ㅏ but in the south they are pronounced with a Korean ㅓ.
One point to note is that in the English examples I gave, the /a/ in ‘cat’ is a shorter sound than the /ɘ/ in ‘cart’. When pronouncing Korean you should make the latter the same length as the short /a/ in ‘cat’.
Finally of the three, Korean ㅗ is pronounced identically to British English “cot”, with a short round o sound. This is different to the longer “oh” or “ou” sound in know/sew.
In addition I’ve been warned about not sticking out my lips far enough when I pronounce ㅗ. It’s easy to drift from ㅗ to ㅓ if you keep your mouth in the same shape, so try to make the ㅗ rounder than the ㅓ.
Two “U” Vowels
- ㅜ round “oo”, stick out lips /u/
- ㅡ wide “u”, spread mouth horizontally /ɯ/
The two Korean “u”s are difficult to pronounce and I admit I still cannot use them well in faster conversation.
The former ㅜ is the easier of the two to pronounce. It is close to English “food” but you must stick out your lips slightly more than
The latter ㅡ is worth studying via IPA and asking a Korean native speaker to pronounce for you. Before seeing it “in the flesh” I found the concept very hard to understand. In IPA it’s represented by /ɯ/ which is known as a close back unrounded vowel The key here is in the name, it’s pronounced in the back of the throat and most importantly you do not make the usual round mouth shape for “u” in English.
I remember the difference between the two through their shapes as characters. ㅡ closely resembles a thin wide mouth which corresponds to how it should be pronounced.
Two “E” Vowels
The final distinction is arguably the most difficult. I’ve asked many native speakers about this and most say that even those fluent in Korean can’t hear the difference between the two of these when they are spoken at normal conversation speeds. However in theory there is a difference.
Their IPA names illustrate how close they really are. So far the simplest explanation I have come across is that ㅔ is a hard and ㅐ is softer. My only suggestion is to ask someone to pronounce it for you and watch their mouth.
The Rest
There are a number of dipthongs and other vowels like ㅚ and ㅟ. I might cover those in another post but if in doubt find a native speaker and get them to pronounce them for you. Good luck!
English “Sh” vs. Japanese “Sh”
This is another thing that surprised me on my travels around Wikipedia. Apparently Japanese “sh” is not identical to English as I have always thought. Also Korean is placed with Japanese rather than with English.
English — ʃ — Sheep — Voiceless palato-alveolar fricative Japanese/Korean — ɕ — 塩 (shio) — Voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative
Note the only difference between the 2 linguistic classifications is the order of palatal / alveolar.
I’ve listened to some of the samples on Wikipedia and I still can’t get my head around the difference. One of my native friends says that the Japanese “sh” is in between English “sink” and English “sheep”.
I’ll look for better explanations or examples but if anyone’s got some I’d love to hear about them.
Syllables in Hebrew, Korean and Japanese
I’m watching some iTunes U podcasts on Elementary Hebrew and in a chapter on Vowels, the presenter makes an interesting point about Hebrew.
He says that Hebrew only has 2 possible syllable constructions:
- Consonant-vowel (Open)
- Consonant-vowel-consonant (Closed)
Although he said at the start of one of the other presentations that there is a word “ab”, which surely is Vowel-consonant. I’m not sure on this.
Going on, and if I’m totally wrong about this then please call me out on it, but it struck me as interesting, thinking back to my study of Japanese, Korean and English.
Japanese
After thinking about Japanese for a while, I still couldn’t get back to such a simple set of rules that he comes up with about Hebrew.
- かたな (ka ta na, sword). Standard Cv pairs that I thought of at first.
- パン (pa n, bread). This has the Japanese ん (n) sound, making a Cvc syllable.
- あか (a ka, red). Now things get interesting, as this is 2 syllables in my mind. The first a being one, and ka being a standard Cv pair.
- あん (a n, red bean paste) is an example of vowel-consonant that is definitely one syllable.
- Finally one that I still can’t get my head around: あおい (aoi, blue). All vowels, sounds like 2 syllables to me but I’m not sure.
So Japanese syllables look something like:
- V — い (i, stomach)
- Cv — か (ka, mosquito)
- Vc — あん (an, red bean paste)
- Vv — あい (ai, love)
- Cvc — パン (pan, bread)
Edit: it seems Japanese phonology focusses on Mora rather than syllables, so each character counts as 1 mora. For example even the っ and ん in the word にっぽん count as morae.
Korean
Swiftly moving on from that quagmire, next is Korean. I’m still new to Korean, but here’s what I know:
- 원 (won, won) Cvc maybe.
- 사과 (sa gua, apple) Cv Cv(v?). Maybe because this is a dipthong the second 2 vowels only count as one.
- 수업 (su eop, lesson). This has something close to a glottal stop at the end, but it seems like Cv Vc to me.
I think Korean is basically the same as Japanese. However it has a greater variety of final consonants used in closed syllables, whereas Japanese only uses ん (n).
Conclusion, or lack of one.
Based on all this, I wonder if the lecturer was just simplifying things in the early lectures and will visit this topic later. I also wonder if there’s a more concrete definition of what makes up a syllable. Some of the vowel-vowel pairs could be dipthongs, but I think I still pronounce them as one syllable.
Korean for the Japanese Learner
I have jokingly said in the past:
The best way to learn Korean is to learn Japanese first.
If you know Japanese, you already have a huge advantage when it comes to learning Korean.
Most of this information you can find on the Wikipedia website for Korean, but I’m approaching it from the perspective of someone who understands Japanese. Bear in mind that I have been learning for less than a year so some of the analyses I make may be incorrect.
First off the bat, if you have any experience in learning European languages, you will notice how similar they are to English. In the same way, Korean and Japanese share extremely similar grammatical rules, and some vocabulary too.
Vocabulary
Before delving into grammar, it’s best I explain how similar the two languages really are simply in terms of vocabulary.
Korean has a different system of writing to Japanese called Hangul. It is a completely phonetic system similar to hiragana and katakana, but differs in the way individual characters are formed. I will not go into the full details of it, but simply show an example of how a word is formed.
Newspaper in Korean is “shin mun” (신문). The individual parts of a word are broken down into single consonants and vowels, which are written as separate parts.
ㅅ=s ㅣ=i ㄴ=n
ㅁ=m ㅜ=u ㄴ=n
These pieces are then arranged to fit in a single square following some simple rules about their shape.
ㅅ ㅣ ㄴ = 신 Notice the first two ‘letters’ are on the top line together, followed by the ‘n’ on the bottom line.
ㅁ ㅜ ㄴ = 문 In comparison, the wide ‘u’ character means that the 3 pieces must be arranged vertically.
In the same way that Japanese has both hiragana and Kanji, Korean has hangul and Hanja (Chinese characters). However in comparison to Japanese, hanja are not mixed in with the phonetic words.
私は新聞を読みました。
This example sentence contains a mixture of Chinese characters and Japanese phonetic hiragana, a style which does not appear in modern Korean. Instead, Korean is now written entirely in phonetic Hangul.
As a learner of Japanese, this can seem harder to read at first. It is possible to read Japanese at high speed by glancing at the Kanji that have tightly-packed information and using the hiragana sections as markers to identify the breaks between words. Using the example above, Kanji rarely come after a word has begun, but instead mark the start of words, and may be followed by particles or verb endings. To break up words in Korean it seems common to use spaces, as with European languages.
Returning to the issue of hangul and Chinese characters, written Korean does not mix the two, but the concept of kanji are still present under the surface even if they are not written explicitly. This can be illustrated with an example:
日曜日に 日本人の 学生は 大学に 行きました。
일요일에 일본인의 학생은 대학에 갔습니다.
il yo il e il bon in ui hak seng un de hak e kas sum ni da
On Sunday the Japanese student went to university.
For now ignore the way that the two languages are pronounced and simply match up the Kanji to the hangul below. The grammar in the two languages is similar enough to transliterate in the example.
日=일 (il) as in 일요일
学=학 (hak) as in 대학
Notice that in Japanese, the 日 character is read as both にち, び and にっ whereas its reading is consistent in Korean. In Japanese there are multiple 音読み (used in Kanji compounds) and 訓読み (used when the word is alone) for each character, which must be learnt as well as in which situations each one is used. In Korean most characters have a single 音読み and a single 訓読み. This combined with your knowledge of Kanji from Japanese means it is possible to ‘create’ words that you know in Japanese from your knowledge of the way to read those words in Korean. To start with a trivial example:
학생 = 学生
대학 = 大学
Can be used to create 大学 生=대학생
An example that I have used myself in the past: I know 학생 = 学生, and 일본=日本, so I know that in Kanji compounds 生=생 and 일=日. I want to make the word 誕生日 in Korean. So it’s likely to be “_생일” and it is in fact just “생일”.
A final point regarding vocabulary worth pointing out is that there are a number of words and Kanji that have similar pronunciation. For example:
かばん = 가방 (ka bang) = bag
新聞 = 신문 (shin mun) = newspaper
As shown here, it’s possible to understand new words from a mixture of knowledge of how Kanji are pronounced in Korean and Japanese vocabulary.
Grammar
Korean and Japanese share the same particle system that confuses so many western learners at first. As someone with experience in Japanese though this works to your advantage. I would strongly recommend anyone learning Korean to use a Japanese-based textbook, as it skips all the explanation of what a particle is and how to use them, and simply gives you a chart similar to the following:
は＝은/는
が＝이/가
を＝을/를
の＝의
に＝에/에게
etc.
While there are other rules that affect how particles are used in Korean, the overall grammatical structure is similar enough to allow transliteration when first learning. I still construct sentences in Japanese in my head and then translate them word-for-word into Korean. This takes more time and I expect to grow out of it eventually, but it produces gramatically-correct sentences so it has its uses.
私は 韓国語を 勉強 して います
저는 한국어를 공부 하고 있어요
Conclusion
That about wraps it up for an introduction. There’s still issues of pronunciation, which is more complex in Korean than Japanese but seems to be relatively easy for English-speakers to learn with a bit of practice. If you know Japanese and are thinking about learning another language, I would recommend Korean as it’s simple to get into and can actually improve your knowledge of Japanese kanji as you learn more to help you create Korean words.
