The Sounds of Korean: A Pronunciation Guide 9780824842482

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THE SOUNDS OF KOREAN A Pronunciation Guide

Miho Choo & William O'Grady

University of HawaPi Press Honolulu

© 2003 University of Hawaii Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 03

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Choo, Mi ho The sounds of Korean : a pronunciation guide / Miho Choo & William O'Grady. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-2601-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Korean language—Pronunciation by foreign speakers. 2. Korean language—Pronunciation by foreign speakers—Problems, exercises, etc. I. O'Grady, William D. (William Delaney), 1952- II. Title. PL915.C466 2003 495.7'3421—dc21 2003042690

Camera-ready copy has been provided by the authors. University of Hawaii Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Printed by Versa Press Inc.

This book is dedicated to the memory of our friend Stan Starosta

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

PART I: Pronunciation Guide 1 Learning to Pronounce Korean 1. 2.

The organization of this book Pronunciation and spelling

3 4 6

2 Vowels

9

1. 2. 3.

9 14 17

Simple vowels Diphthongs Appendix: The mechanics of vowels

3 Consonants 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

21

ü , Ü, & HH E , n , & vl =1, - i , & Ti A, x , & M A&M * n, & o s Appendix: The details of aspiration

4 Adjustments 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

23 29

35 40 45 50 52 53 55

58

Consonant relinking Voicing Diphthong reduction Contraction Special changes to the pronunciation of vowels reduction Aspiration Pronunciation of ^ as if it were a Nasalization Pronunciation of as if it were n or o

v

58 60 62 64 68 69 71 73 76 81

vi

CONTENTS

11. 12. 13. 14.

Addition of Tensing a insertion Modifications to the pronunciation of c. and e

15. Consonant weakening

83 87 90 92 94

5 Prosody

97

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

97 99 102 104 105

Pitch, loudness, and length Focus Intonation Intonation and the expression of emotion Thought groups

References

107

Glossary

109

PART II: Practice Exercises How to Use the Practice Exercises

113

1 Practice: Vowels

115

2 Practice: Consonants

133

3 Practice: Adjustments

187

4 Practice: Prosody

226

Answer Guide for the Practice Exercises

239

List of Practice Exercises

253

Index of Topics

255

Acknowledgments We are grateful to a number of people who took the time to read earlier versions of The Sounds of Korean and to provide helpful comments. Special thanks are due to Dong-Jae Lee, Hae-Young Kim. Sang-Yee Cheon, and Youngkeun Lee for their detailed comments and suggestions. We also received helpful feedback and advice from Ned Shultz, Sunyoung Lee, S.-Y. Lee, Kyu-Seek Hwang, Sooyeon Tahk, Young-sook Shim, Hyun-ho Joo, and two anonymous referees for the University of Hawai'i Press. Eduardo Contreras provided valuable technical support, Victoria Anderson offered insightful advice on phonetic matters, and Peter Kobayashi assisted us with the artwork. Shinwoong Lee played an indispensable role in the creation of the CD that accompanies this book. In addition to serving as the male voice on the CD during many long hours of studio work, he offered valuable advice on the recording material itself. We also owe a special debt of gratitude to In-Sung Ko, for his assistance with the palatography and linguography studies that we drew upon in describing the place of articulation of various Korean consonants. Thanks are also due to the five native speakers of Korean who served as subjects for this study and to the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawai'i for funding this work. We would also like to express our appreciation to the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services at the University of Texas at Austin for their technical and financial support during the preparation of the CD. Special thanks are due to our audio specialist Mike Heidenreich, who spent countless hours supervising the recording and preparing the final version of the CD. In addition, we are grateful to director Joe TenBarge, who played a major role in securing funding for the project. Finally, we owe thanks to the editorial and production team at the University of Hawai'i Press who contributed to bringing this book into being—especially executive editor Pat Crosby, managing editor Ann Ludeman, production editor Lucille Aono, and copyeditor Nancy R. Woodington.

Vll

Parti Pronunciation Guide

Chapter 1 Learning to Pronounce Korean How many different speech sounds are there? Fifty? A hundred? The answer may surprise you: there are about eight hundred—six hundred consonant sounds and two hundred vowels. 1 That's far more than any single language can use. To keep things manageable, individual languages typically make contrasts among no more than fifty sounds. And with about eight hundred sounds to choose from, it's unlikely that any two languages will end up with exactly the same sound system. Herein lies one of the great challenges of second language learning. Although infants are able to hear even the subtlest differences among sounds in any language, this ability starts to diminish around the age of ten or twelve months. By the time children finish elementary school, they have to struggle to make and hear phonetic contrasts other than those in their native language. 2 And, of course, things don't get any easier for adolescents and adults. That doesn't mean that you can't become fluent in another language, however. It is possible to master the pronunciation of a second language— but only if you go about it in a systematic way. You need to know precisely what sounds your new language has, how they are produced, and what changes they undergo in particular contexts. Then you have to practice— both by listening and by speaking. The first goal of second language learning is to pass through what might be called the "threshold of intelligibility"—to reach the point where you can make yourself understood and can understand what others are saying. 3 To achieve that goal in Korean, three challenges must be met. First, Korean has a number of speech sounds that have no direct counterpart in English—including three 'p'-like sounds, three 't'-like sounds, three 'k'-like sounds, three 'ch'-like sounds, and two 's'-like

'Ladefoged (1999). Eimas (1996:31), Werker et al. (1996). for example, Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin (1996).

2

3

4

THE SOUNDS OF KOREAN

sounds, in addition to several unfamiliar vowels. Mastering these contrasts is a necessary step toward becoming fluent in Korean. Second, the pronunciation of particular Korean sounds can vary enormously depending on the context in which they occur. Take , for instance. At the end of a word like ^ 'hundred', its pronunciation resembles the 'k' sound in the English word backbone, but it is pronounced like a ' g ' sound in ^ H 'hundred days' and like a 'ng' sound in ^ i t 'million'. Learning how these adjustments work will dramatically improve your ability to speak and understand Korean. Third, Korean uses pitch, loudness, and length (what linguists call prosody) in ways that give it a rhythm and a flow quite different from English. Learning these aspects of pronunciation is also vital to improving the naturalness of your Korean. We will consider all of these things in this book. If you're a beginner, you'll find the information you need to cross the threshold of intelligibility in Korean. And if you're a more advanced student, you'll have an opportunity to fine-tune your pronunciation and improve your comprehension, so that both become more native-like.

1.1 The organization of this book The Sounds of Korean is divided into two parts. Part I consists of five chapters, all focusing on the description of different aspects of Korean pronunciation. Chapter 2 presents the vowel sounds, while chapter 3 deals with consonants. Chapter 4 discusses the various adjustment processes that modify speech sounds in different positions within words and phrases, and chapter 5 tackles the role of prosody in expressing meaning and emotion. Through explanations and examples, we'll take you through the basic facts and contrasts that are needed to make your speech intelligible and naturalsounding. Throughout our discussion, we will focus on the pronunciation of socalled standard Korean. This is the Korean which is spoken by educated people in the Seoul area and which is almost always taught in second language classrooms.

LEARNING TO PRONOUNCE KOREAN

5

Figure 1.1 Map of Korea Part II of The Sounds of Korean makes up the heart of the book. It consists of a large set of practice exercises specifically designed to complement the descriptions and explanations in Part I. These exercises, each with its own instructions, have been recorded on the accompanying CD by two native speakers of standard Korean, one male and one female. In preparing the practice exercises, we were careful to employ natural colloquial speech that represents the way Korean is actually spoken. The goal of language learning is to become proficient in a new language—which means being able to communicate and to understand what others are saying. Attaining this goal is possible only if you are exposed to Korean as it is spoken in the real world. If Koreans pronounce H}- 'Look' as if it were and if they sometimes pronounce 'flower + subject marker' as if it A were 51 ], you need to know this. Otherwise, you'll never understand spoken Korean, and your own speech will never sound fluent.

6

THE SOUNDS OF KOREAN

Some of the practice exercises target the pronunciation of individual words, while others focus on full sentences. In constructing both types of practice exercise, we have made every effort to choose common vocabulary items and to use them in natural and colloquial sentences. In addition, we have made sure that the words and sentences on the CD are pronounced at a moderate speed. Even this may seem fast if you are a beginning student. Indeed, some of the subtler phonetic contrasts found in Korean are initially difficult to perceive at any speed. However, as you make progress, the sounds and rhythms that give Korean its phonetic identity will become increasingly familiar to you. It will be easier to make yourself understood, it will be easier to comprehend what Koreans are saying, and it will even be easier to read and write the language. With diligent and regular use of the practice exercises, you may be surprised at how quickly your pronunciation and comprehension improve—even a few weeks of faithful practice will make a difference.

1.2 Pronunciation and spelling Before we go any further, a note of caution is in order. There is a natural temptation to pronounce words the way they are written, but this just won't work for Korean. (Or for English either, as you'll realize if you think about the pronunciation of words such as Wednesday, comb, and knee.) Written languages differ in terms of how they capture the relationship between pronunciation and spelling. In a language such as Spanish, the writing system represents pronunciation quite directly, and there is nearly a one-to-one relationship between letters and sounds. In Chinese, on the other hand, written symbols represent entire words rather than individual sounds. The Korean writing system, hangul, lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. 4 In general, the goal of hangul is to provide a single spelling for each root and each suffix, without regard for variations in their pronunciation. So 'clothes' has a single spelling, regardless of how the final consonant is pronounced—as a 't'-like sound when the word stands alone, as an 's'-like sound in (with the direct object marker), as a 'sh'-like 4

For a general discussion of the history and workings of hangul, see Kim-Renaud (1997) and Sampson (1985).

LEARNING TO PRONOUNCE KOREAN

7

sound in (with the subject marker), or as an 'n'-like or even 'm'-like sound in -^r1?} (with the suffix that means 'only'). English spelling often adopts a similar strategy, by the way. That's why the root in words like creative and creation is spelled creat even though the t has a 'sh'-like pronunciation in the second word. As we'll see in more detail in the chapters that follow, Korean spelling follows the principle of one spelling per root or suffix with great regularity and efficiency. In fact, one of the advantages of studying the sound system of Korean is that you will also end up with a better understanding of how hangul works. In describing and discussing the sounds of Korean, it is sometimes necessary to represent a word's pronunciation more directly than spelling permits. As you will see, for example, words such as ^ 'input' and ^ r si 'petal' are pronounced very differently from the way they are spelled. Where spelling does not suffice, we use hangul inside square brackets to help indicate how the word is p r o n o u n c e d — ^ ] for « ^ and [ i r 1 ^ ] for # si. This does not capture all the phonetic details, of course, but it is nonetheless helpful, especially when used in conjunction with the CD.

Syllables and consonant relinking Another important feature of hangul has to do with the manner in which it represents syllables. A syllable is simply a chunk of speech built around a vowel—so you'll always have as many syllables in a word as there are vowel sounds. (The English word bed contains just one syllable, ago has two, computer has three, and so on.) As you have probably already noticed, hangul groups sounds together into syllable-sized chunks. In words such as T-^-T- 'tree', ^ ^ 'eat', and 'automobile', these letter groupings correspond exactly to the syllables used in Korean speech. However, things work differently when one syllable ends in a consonant and the next syllable begins with a vowel sound—as happens in words such as 'cooked rice + subject marker', S i 0 ! 'language', Si 0 !] 'in front', and so on. Under these circumstances, the consonant ends up being pronounced at the beginning of the second syllable, thanks to an adjustment

8

THE SOUNDS OF KOREAN

process that we call consonant relinking.5 As a result, hv°1 is pronounced [ ], ^ is pronounced [ ], and so forth. Consonant relinking is a far-reaching process in Korean and can even extend across word boundaries when two words are pronounced together as a group, with no intervening pauses. That's why -tr 'pretty umbrella' is pronounced [°fl M^f-i+J, with the