Recently, while I was at work, I got a text from my one cousin who wants to learn Korean, and all she asked was “How the hell did you teach yourself the Korean alphabet?” Honestly, after thinking about it, it really is a daunting task. It is very different from the western alphabet and so many of the vowels sound similar (as do the consonants) that you think it will take forever to be able to distinguish between all of the sounds, as there are a lot of them. In order to hep all of you out, I’m going to share a few of the things that I did to help me distinguish the pronunciation of all of the characters, as well as just figure out what is what.
- Create Flashcards. When I was trying to memorize thins when I was learning French, and when I was trying to learn the Korean alphabet, I made my own flashcards that had the character on one side, and the sound it was supposed to make on the back. Now, this won’t help you really distinguish between the difference between things like ㄱ,ㅋ, and ㄲ, but it will definitely help you familiarize yourself with the characters as a whole and help you start saying, okay, a character that looks likes this, makes a sound similar to this.
- Don’t follow the romanizations they give you. To be 100% honest, Korean romanizations (that is Korean written in the English alphabet) are awful They don’t accurately portray the sound, especially double consonants, and the romanizations really do a bad job of describing how the sound is actually said in Korean. My one friend, I asked him what his name was in Korean, as I only knew his English name, and he gave it to me in the romanized characters. By the time I asked him, I could already read 한글 (pronounced hangeul) pretty well, and I couldn’t read the romanization, because it made me cringe. So I made him write it for me in 한글 just so I knew how it was supposed to be pronounced.
- Watch pronunciation videos on Youtube. There was one video that was done by Talk to me in Korean that I actually watched so many times to help me understand the difference in the sound of the consonants. I watched this video a number of times as well as a few others:
- Write your own version of the Romanizations. I personally had to do this because sometimes it is just way easier to put things in your own words, and over time, you will find your own way to think of the pronunciation, especially the vowels, as there are a lot of them, and it will take you awhile to distinguish them, as even Korean people mess it up sometimes (they even do it on purpose sometimes)
- When learning new words, at the beginning, make sure you have an audio file that you can repeat after. This really helped reinforce the sounds in my head, and helped me start figuring out what sounds different characters make when next to eachother
Other than all of that, the biggest things you need to remember is that it will take time and practice. Just make sure that you are practicing every single day, and you will have it down to a science before you know it. Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t make sense to you at first, as you will get there eventually. Be patient with yourself, don’t get frustrated, as one day you will suddenly say to yourself, “when the hell did I learn that?” This is something that I do all the time, and I am still amazed every single day that I taught myself all of this stuff to the point that I can just babble in it.
You’ll get there one day too, K-Nuggets!
사랑합니다!
–Rachel
