Hello lovechenyuxi8484 - welcome to KC101
Please feel free to make liberal use of the forums here.
If the distinction between the vowel sounds of ㅓ ㅕ and ㅗ ㅛ are the only things you are having trouble with then I would say you are doing great.
First off, I assume that you know these are vowels and have no intrinsic meaning on their own; furthermore, with the exception of grammatical discussion, Hangul vowels are always coupled with at least one consonant to form a syllabic group.
ㅓ - often romanized as "eo" sounds like the
short "o" in
love and
of i.e. short "o" sound
ㅕ -"yeo" additional stroke simply adds a "y" sound
ㅗ - typically romanized as "o" has a
long "o" sound as in
oh and
tow
ㅛ - "yo" additional stroke simply adds a "y" sound
However, in everyday conversation the sounds are often muddled because everyone speaks a little differently, causing it to be difficult for a student of Korean to hear a distinct difference in certain sounds.
Other sounds that students of Korean often have trouble distinguishing the difference between are:
ㅜ/ㅡ
ㅐ/ㅔ
The only way to overcome this difficulty is to listen and read repeatedly, and I mean literally thousands of times. If you are serious about learning Korean, or any foreign language, please keep in mind that the average adult knows something on order of 30,000 words in his native language, so to reach even a modest level of fluency requires patience and dedication.
Keep up the good work. And remember, sometimes you won't fully understand what you learn on step one until you reach step 50, but the key is to continue climbing.
George Posten - fellow student - aka - 나영훈
