General Pronunciation and the Movement of Sounds to Other Syllables
Korean pronunciation is entirely different in structure compared to English pronunciation. You may have noticed this from listening to the recording files above. In English, whenever a word ends in a consonant, we always make a little sound after saying that last letter. It is very faint and difficult to hear for a person with a 'non-Korean ear' to hear. But try to hear the difference.
In English, if I were to say "ship", there is a tiny sound of breath following the 'p' when our lips open.
In English, if I were to say "dock", there is a tiny sound of breath following the 'ck' when your throat opens.
In English, if I were to say "cod", (or kod) there is a tiny sound of breath following the 'd' when your tongue is removed from the roof of your mouth.
In Korean, they do not have this final 'breath' sound. This is hard to understand at first to English speakers. Whatever position one's mouth is in when they make the sound of a final consonant in a syllable – it stays like that. Listen to the following differences in English and Korean pronunciation of the same syllables:
In English:
In Korean: (meaning 'ten')
In English =
In Korean: (meaning 'poison')
In English =
In Korean = (meaning 'soon')
However...
If a word has a consonant as its final sound, and the first letter on the following syllable is 'ㅇ' (meaning that the first sound is a vowel) the breath from the final consonant from the first syllable gets pronounced with the vowel from that syllable. It is confusing to write in a sentence, so I will show you an example:
For example:
먹 in Korean is pronounced the same way as described earlier (i.e. by cancelling out the 'last-breath' after the 'ㄱ' in '먹.' For example
먹
If the following syllable is a consonant, nothing changes and the two syllables are pronounced as usual:
However, if the next syllable starts with a vowel the 'breath' after the 'k' sound is made along with this vowel. For example:
Technically, it sounds like:
머거
Note that it is not actually written like this, but only sounds like this.
Also note that if these two syllables were pronounced separately (먹 and 어), this phenomenon would not happen.
(pronounced separately)
The most confusing of this rule is when ㅅ or ㅆ are the last letters in a syllable. When either of these is the final letter of a syllable, they are NOT pronounced as 'S.' Instead, they are pronounced similar to a 'D' sound. The reason for this is the same as I described earlier, that is, Korean people don't allow that 'breath' of air out of their mouth on a final consonant. As soon one's tongue touches their teeth when making the "S" sound, the sound stops and no breath is made after it.
Listen to the following syllables to train your ear:
But, just like 먹 and 어, if syllables ending in ㅅ or ㅆ connect to another syllable where the first sound is a vowel, that ㅅ or ㅆ is pronounced as S combined with the following vowel (I know, it is very confusing).
As with 먹다, if the following syllable starts with a consonant, it gets pronounced normally:
Explaining why different endings would come after a word (for example, 먹다 vs. 먹어 and 했다 vs. 했어) is too difficult to explain in this lesson. In and of Unit 1, you will be introduced to conjugation and when you would have to use these different pronunciation rules.
