The Korean Language

Introduction

I first began to be interested in the Korean language when I started listening to K-pop about four years ago. I think the language is beautiful and hearing songs in Korean cemented that thought. Initially I watched lyric videos for songs and looked at translations for the English words, but it does take time for translations to appear, so I decided to try and learn the language on my own, instead of having to wait for translations for every video. I taught myself the basics, but eventually forgot about studying and forgot everything. So, I am using this 6-week project as an opportunity to start again with the language from the beginning.

Week 1

Within my first week of attempting to learn basic Korean, I have also learned a lot about myself and the best ways for me to retain information. The Korean language is a lot like Chinese or Japanese in that they use characters that represent sounds to write the language, rather than using an alphabet with individual letters. This has been a major adjustment for me, as someone who only speaks English. There are also characters that have different variations in how you write them, but they sound technically the same when speaking. It can get quite confusing to remember which sound goes with which character(s). Because I am not a very good visual learner, it was hard at first for me to match the characters with their sounds, but using an audio tool on Duolingo that repeats the sound out loud to me has been helping cement these basic characters into my brain.

I usually practice for at least 15 minutes a day, but I try to squeeze in a full 30 to 45 minutes if I can. Having Duolingo on my phone and having easy access to be able to practice has a huge time-saver for me. In case I’m waiting for an appointment to start or I’m on my breaks at work, I can pull my phone out and practice right then and there!

Week 2

My second week of basic Korean was much harder than I anticipated. At first the answers as to which character match with which sounds were obvious, but this week it became more complicated. For example the sounds “se”, “sae”, and “ssye” are all pronounced the same, but the characters for each are written differently and all are variations of the original character “se”. As you can see in the photo the character for “se” has two vertical lines with one small line coming out from the left. In the character “sae” that small line is actually in between the two vertical lines.

I am used to individual letters making up entire words, and getting used to forming words using sounds and symbols has been difficult for me. Not to mention the arrangement of the consonants and vowels can also be different depending on the word. It is a general rule that every syllable in Korean has to start with a consonant and include a vowel.

Week 3

This week I worked on actual words and syllables rather than just sounds and characters. This is my third round of lessons on Duolingo and I had to listen to the pronunciation of the words and either match what the lesson was saying to the English translation or vice versa. I found it really interesting that lots of the words are actually pronounced in English (with a small accent) but had names written in Hangul (the Korean version of the alphabet). In the picture above, it shows Starbucks written in Korean, but it is pronounced “Starbucks” just like in English. This happened for a lot of words that were in my lesson like “McDonalds” “Samsung” “motors”, etc. I can only assume that this is because these words are the official names of places and/or companies, therefore it is easier to just pronounce the original name instead of trying to deal with a tricky translation.

Week 4

For my fourth week learning Korean, I transitioned from words like “Samsung” and “Starbucks” to more simple, conversational words like “apple”, “bread”, “house”, etc. Duolingo has been a really good resource for learning and pronouncing simple words as they provide photos and audio to accompany the actual word. The most difficult part for me has been remembering how to spell and write the words. The use of characters in the Korean language has been a difficult adjustment because the written language is arranged differently than English. How words are read out loud depends on the physical construction of the word. Instead of individual letters, sounds that use either consonants and/or vowels make up a word, and depending on the arrangement of those sounds is how the word is read and written. I had trouble for a long time understanding the character arrangement, but recently found a simple breakdown of how characters are arranged through a website called korean-arts.com. This website provided a simple explanation for the basics of the Korean language including character arrangement, consonant and vowel rules and a list of the symbols and sounds of the Korean alphabet.

Week 5

This week on Duolingo I learned a lot more simple words like “student”, “movie”, “family”, and “friend”. Towards the end of my week five lessons though, I was having to translate more complicated sentences with a noun, verb and descriptive word. Sentences like “The man was in the house” or “The Korean woman was cool” or “The movie had a meaningful message”. The sentence structure in Korean is a little complicated. You start the sentence with the who but the verb doesn’t come until the very end (usually the last word(s) in a sentence). This structure took some getting used to as that is the exact opposite of what happens in English. I had a rough week with remembering how to spell things too since it was hard for me to recount how the words were spelled and what they meant while also trying to put them in the proper sentence structure. Hopefully next week I can improve my skills!

Week 6-Final

My final week of learning basic Korean went a lot more smoothly then I thought it would! I thought as the lessons got harder I would struggle more, but the more practice I get, the easier it is to translate sentences and complete proper sentence structure. I am still working on basic sentences but reading the language has become fun for me as I actually understand what the characters are saying. I still need to use a reference sheet for some of the sounds, but I have mostly memorized the Korean alphabet now. A lot of what helped me learn Korean was more exposure and study time for the basic principles of the language. The more you know about the alphabet, character structure, and sentence structure, the easier it is to form full sentences (at least on paper). I haven’t quite gotten around to speaking the language yet, but with more time and practice I hope to soon be able to hold a steady conversation in Korean!

This project has been really motivating and helpful for me, as I have been wanting to learn Korean for a long time but could never find the motivation or will to start. This project gave me the opportunity to begin on my journey to being fluent in Korean!