Hi, I'm Ashley.
Korean Log

April 2025

25 - Some more deep diving in to IPA

Read a bit more about Korean phonology on Wikipedia and found some interesting facts that would help with the pronunicaiton. Note I am not using the correct linguistic terms for this.

  1. For the Hangul syllable blocks that are comprised of two consonant clusters at the bottom final section e.g. 앉, there are actually phonetic rules for what it would sound like.
    • For clusters with a ㅎ on the right side, it is sometimes “carried” over to the next syllable. This is called elided consonants?
  2. There have been changes to Korean phonology through the decades, notably that 애($\epsilon$) and 에(e)not have no phonetic difference.

Also because I have no sense of responsbility for my academics, I spent a good chunk of time fixing up my Anki cards. They’re cleaner now, and I found a neat add-on that resizes the pictures when I paste them. So no more ugly cards! Now if I would just study them…

23 - Fluent Forever and IPA!

Spent basically the entire day learning how to decipher IPA symbols. I think I got the basics down for consonants and vowels in terms of how the charts work. It’s pretty awesome how linguists were able to compile all of this, but holy cow did they go ham. Just the amount of terminology and possible combinations and categories is mind-boggling.

Found a lot of resources, the ones that helped me the most:

Still need to practice (with actual words) but now that I understand how they actually work physically, it’s a lot easier to make the sound instead of imitating by ear. Which I think is a big win.

Next is to repeat it a bunch of times until it’s ingrained in my memory. I also found an Anki deck of minimal pairs so that’ll help my listening more to. But it is in practice (aka the real world) that will truly test me…

A bit of an aside…my very first introduction to Hangul was this comic. It is great for visual mnemonics but eventually I ended equating the English pronunication of the letters to Hangul. It also doesn’t explain the difference between regular (ㄱ), aspirated (ㅋ) and tense consonants (ㄲ) that well, which I think is the hardest part about Korean phonetics for English speakers. So for newcomers, definitely use it in the beginning but once you got it down, switch over to IPA.

I’ve been learning on and off now for about a year. Did some Billy Go videos - learned Hangul, basic phrases, vocab and grammar. Then stopped to take a more independent approach with Anki + ChatGPT. Then stopped completely. Then did some periodic readings of TTMIK’s Korean reading books. In my most recent “consistent” block, I have been:

I’ve started reading Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner and it has some great tips about how to make the most of your language learning. Some things I will start doing once I have more time: