This is sort the start to a blog series/resource for how I went about teaching myself Korean.
As for some of my language learning background, I’m native in English, but I also have some experience with French, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese. I took French throughout my high school career, but unfortunately, it’s the language I retain the least at the moment. I can still understand basic sentences as they are presented to me, but I can’t generate anything of my own. For Mandarin, I can hold conversations and write basic sentences from memory, then with the help of a dictionary, I can write longer essays, but I still find the news fairly difficult to approach. However, I can translate most daily conversation nearly immediately on the fly. In Japanese, I can somewhat work my way through online materials and hold simple conversations. I can also understand some songs as I listen to them and can do some translation on the fly. In fact, I have had to translate between all three of Chinese, Japanese, and English on the fly before, though I wouldn’t say I did a stellar job of it then.
So, coming into Korean, I was somewhat familiar with language learning, but I wanted to take some of my past lessons and use them to really blast through a lot of the basics. From my past experiences, I came to realize a lot of what much of the language learning community has long been shouting, but input is super important. When I really started diving into and learning Japanese, I focused very hard on being able to innately understand the language as I learned aspects of it. It wasn’t enough if I could understand something by breaking it down in my mind; I wanted to be able to hear something and immediate get a feel for what it meant. This meant that when I was learning the Kana’s, I also focused on how each Kana sounded, how to make that sound, and then how to actually distinguish that sound. Much of my early Japanese listening experience was actually just listening to slower material and trying to recognize each syllable or mora as it came, acknowledge that sound, and then immediately let it go to process the next one. It was almost meditative in a way, and there were actually plenty of times where I went to bed listening to some material and just doing that until I dozed off.
Because I attribute a lot of my early ability to work through Japanese to this kind of listening exercise. I’m aiming to do the same with Korean (I’m also definitely hoping to use some of the language similarities to further help myself here).
Of course, the first thing I had to do was learn Hangul…
So, I went out and started looking for resources. This video by Sam Gellman was a great primer to roughly what to expect, but I’m not sure I would consider it any sort of “comprehensive” resource. So I turned to a few other google results, visited Wikipedia, and just ended up surprised at how much it seemed like it was being overcomplicated! I almost started to feel like it was actually easier to learn Japanese!
So I read deeper and ended up devising the following chart for the basic Hangul consonants. I’m certain that there’s going to be parts of this chart which aren’t 100% right, but I really made this more for my own understanding, and figured I could share it here too.
Hangul Consonants - Structure of Mouth / Tongue Position / Aspiration
| g | n | m | s | o(ng) | r/l | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| base | ㄴ | ㅁ | ㅅ | ㅇ | ㄹ | |
| lightly aspirated tongue tap | ㄱ | ㄷ | ㅂ | ㅈ | ||
| heavier aspiration | ㅋ | ㅌ | ㅍ | ㅊ | ㅎ |
These very roughly correspond to the following English letters/sounds.
| base | n | m | s | o(ng) | r/l | |
| lightly aspirated tongue tap | g | d | b | j/ch | ||
| heavier aspiration | k | t | p | ch/ts | h(o) |
Then, double consonants like ㄲ and ㄸ are just the same as the above, except with greater emphasis.
Also, just like English’s alphabet can have letters with multiple pronounciations, Korean also has consonants that change in pronounciation based on the prior consonant.
I highly recommend checking other websites that have the sounds to really hear what the isolated consonant sound should be, like 90daykorean and zkorean (which are just some that I found with a quick search. I’m sure there are plenty more and probably better ones out there).
As for the vowels, I didn’t have as much luck organizing them in more visually clear format. I pretty much just grouped it with one table for simple, another table for dipthong -derived compound vowels, another for iotized vowels, and a last one for the remaining compound vowels.
Finally, I did find How to study Korean, which after a quick skim, seems to be a really nice resource that organizes things in a fairly approachable manner. After I did the above, I was able to blast my way through Unit 0 from that site and begin to understand Hangul.
Now that I had a really basic handle on Hangul, I plan to continue to practice my Hangul through Scripts and by maybe occasionally quizzing myself on paper (for example, asking myself, “What is the consonant for r/l again?”, or by trying to make that chart I made above from memory).
Finally, since I also started to get a basic grasp of the sounds, I intend to listen to some basic material, like Listening in Slow Korean by Talk To Me in Korean or maybe even with a Korean Anime or something. I’m learning this very casually, so who knows when I’ll make my next post. I might go and clean up some of the content from this post one day, but that’s all for now!