In the previous post, I mentioned that every Korean letter comes with at least one consonant and one vowel. If you think about it, this premise is a little bit terrifying. Does this mean that the Koreans don't know how to pronounce standalone vowels such as "O (as in O Canada)," or the word "a"?
It turns out that the Koreans language resolves this issue in a pretty ingenious way. The Koreans devised a consonant that is equivalent to zero. The consonant even looks like a zero, and it is the consonant "ㅇ," called "ee-ung." In the deconstruction...
Showing posts with label basic korean. Show all posts
Showing posts with label basic korean. Show all posts
Friday, May 5, 2017
Thursday, May 4, 2017
Basic Korean #2: One consonant, one vowel
We're going to take it easy, and learn Korean very slowly. This is because the alphabet system is completely different from the English alphabet (in comparison, when I started learning French, I don't think I spent any time in learning their alphabet. To this day, although I'm semi-fluent in French, I still have to think a little bit before sounding out the names of the alphabet!)
There are two unique features of the Korean language.
First of all, in order to form a Korean letter, you always need at least one consonant and one vowel. If you remember...
Basic Korean #1: Deconstructing Korean letters
Korean letters are confusing! While we have alphabets, there must be thousands of independent characters. So it must look intimidating at first glance. If I were to start learning Korean as an adult, this is how I would want to start.
I would first want to know that the Korean letters can, and should be deconstructed. Here is one of the most complicated words that you might encounter (it's not a real word; it's just constructed that all the "parts"...