Teach English in CaigongzhuAng Zhen - Tianjin

Pronunciation Problems in KoreaThe often puzzling pronunciation that is encountered when speaking english with a Korean national can be a source of frustration or amusement depending on the occasion. Having lived in South Korea for four years, I got pretty good at recognizing the primary pronunciation errors and made a game of interpreting the intended words. Here are the most frequently made mistakes I observed. When a Korean pronounces an ?s? sound that is followed by a long ?e?, he will invariably want to say ?shee.? So ?sea? becomes ?shee? and? blessing? is ?bleshing.? This is understandable when you realize that in Korean the ?s? sound always becomes ?sh? when combined with the ?e? sound. This also accounts for the often heard ?ee? added to english words ending in ?sh? or ?ch?, like ?washee? or ?churchee? for instance. The Korean is so used to sounding the ?sh? and ?ee? together that they fail to stop with just the consonant ending. No word in Korean ends that way. Only a lot of practice with these endings will overcome this habit. Another mistake is sounding an /ea/ in place of the long ?e.? This turns ?sheet? into ?shit?. I hear this often when helping to make the bed with my Korean wife. Vowels in Korean are mostly pronounced with relaxed facial muscles. The student must learn to use stronger muscular contractions to make some english sounds. The method I use to help the speaker create the proper ?ee? sound is to have them push their chin forward, thus pulling the back of the tongue up. Having them do this while smiling gets the correct sound for them to hear. The consonants ?R? and ?L? provide the most frequent amusement from listening to Koreans speak english. The error comes from interchanging the two sounds almost randomly. The ?R? sound does not exist in Korean except for imported words like ?radio.? Koreans understand the meaning perfectly when hearing either ?radio? or ?ladio?, so they don?t make the distinction very well when speaking english. The use of tongue twisters with these letters provides good practice and adds good natured fun to a class. One habit that is puzzling is the dropping of entire syllables. I have noticed particularly the ?er? sound at the end of words like ?river? and ?pastor? being dropped, leaving just the sounds ?riv? and ?past.? This may be related to the fact that the Korean language has no combined consonant sounds. So it is easier to just drop the second consonant, since it is an unfamiliar sound anyway. Similarly, consonant combinations such as ?lk? and ?rk? are very difficult for Koreans to differentiate. The words ?walk? and ?work? are often pronounced identically. english requires a lot more fine-grained distinctions in the vowel sounds, compared to those of Korean. For instance, one of my adult students reading a story about a bear continued to call the animal a ?beer.? The distinction in pronunciation was difficult for her to produce. One way to help overcome this problem is to provide a good grounding in pronouncing all the phonemic vowels early in english training. The apparent progress may be slower, but it will pay big dividends later. So, in general, it can be said that the regularly observed english pronunciation mistakes made by Koreans arise from transferring the uniqueness of the Korean language phonology into the english producing process. Knowledge of the source of the primary errors can provide the insight that can turn a frustrating pronunciation confrontation into an imparting of this understanding to the student. When they can connect a mistake with its source in their own language, it provides a key by which they can remind themselves of the proper english. This poses a strong case for english teachers to study the basics of pronunciation of the native language of their students.