1.1 Plain, Tense, and Aspirated — Epoché
What you will be able to do Produce and hear the three-way contrast in ㄱ ㄲ ㅋ , ㄷ ㄸ ㅌ , ㅂ ㅃ ㅍ and ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ , and say which of the three a word has. Say why the English contrast between g and k is not the Korean one, and what question to ask instead. Run the paper test and tell from it which series you have just produced. Read twenty minimal pairs and sets aloud without collapsing any of them. Prerequisites : 0.6, which closes the alphabet, so that every letter in this lesson is one you can already read and type. Nothing else is needed; if the doubled letters still look unfamiliar, look again at the tables of 0.4 Hangul before you start. This is the hardest thing in the language for an English speaker, and it opens the Sounds volume for that reason. Korean has three consonants where English has two, in four places in the mouth. Getting it wrong does not produce an accent; it produces the wrong word, because the three are as different to a Korean ear as b and p are to yours. The problem is one of attention, not of anatomy: your mouth can already make all three sounds, but it cannot yet make them on purpose, because English never asked you to notice the difference. The rule Each letter below is a consonant made at one of four places in the mouth. At each place there are three, and they differ in what the air does at the moment of release. The plain letter releases with a small amount of breath, the aspirated letter with a strong puff, and the doubled letter with almost none at all, from a throat and mouth held tight. Plain Tense, written doubled Aspirated ㄱ , at the soft palate ㄲ ㅋ ㄷ , at the teeth ridge ㄸ ㅌ ㅂ , at the lips ㅃ ㅍ ㅈ , just behind the teeth ㅉ ㅊ You met these shapes in lesson 0.3 as a picture of the system: adding a stroke gives the aspirated letter, doubling gives the tense one. The shapes tell the truth about the sounds. The extra stroke is the extra puff of air; the doubling is the extra tightness. Nothing here is arbitrary, which is a real advantage: once you can hear the difference, the spelling tells you which one to make, every time. One more letter has only two members. ㅅ has a tense partner ㅆ but no aspirated one, because a hiss made at the teeth is already full of moving air. Treat the two as a two-way version of the same contrast: the doubled letter is tighter and sharper, held a little longer. So the rule for reading aloud is short. If the letter is doubled, tighten everything and let out no air. If it has the extra stroke, push a clear puff of air out after it. If it is neither, do neither and stay relaxed. Everything difficult in this lesson is in the third case, because a relaxed consonant is exactly what English does not have at the start of a word. Why English asks the wrong question When an English speaker hears a consonant of this kind, the question the ear asks is: were the vocal folds vibrating? That is the difference between bat and pat , between doe and toe , between goat and coat . It is called voicing, and it is the only question English needs here. Korean does not ask it at the start of a word. All three series are voiceless there. So the cue your ear has been trained on since infancy returns the same answer three times, and the three sounds arrive as one blurred sound with some random variation. The sounds are not identical; the measuring instrument is pointed at the wrong quantity. The quantity Korean measures is the release: how much breath comes out, and how tight the throat is while it happens. English has this quantity too, but only as a side effect, so you have never had to notice it. Say cool and then school with your hand in front of your mouth. The c of cool comes with a puff; the k inside school comes with almost none, because English drops the aspiration after s. Those two are very nearly the Korean aspirated and the Korean tense consonant, and you have been producing both all your life. The Korean plain consonant sits between them. That gives you three anchors, and it also explains the commonest beginner's mistake. Hearing ㄱ at the start of a word, an English speaker writes down g, because it lacks the puff that English k has. Hearing ㅋ , the same speaker writes k. Then, hearing ㄲ , which lacks the puff as well, the speaker writes g again, and two Korean words have been collapsed into one. The cure is to stop asking whether it was voiced and to start asking how much air came out. A second cue is free in modern Seoul speech: the vowel after a plain letter tends to start lower in pitch than the vowel after an aspirated or a doubled one. If the breath is right, the pitch usually follows by itself. The paper test Here is the experiment that makes the difference visible, which is the next best thing to hearing it. Tear a strip of thin paper about two fingers wide, hold it by one end, and let the other end hang a few centimetres in front of your lips. Say the three words of a set, one after another, and watch the paper. Say the aspirated one, the word with ㅌ or ㅋ or ㅍ , and the paper jumps: that is the puff, roughly what happens when you say English top with emphasis. Say the doubled one, with ㄸ or ㄲ or ㅃ , and the paper should not move at all. If it moves even slightly you are leaking air, and a Korean listener will hear the plain or the aspirated consonant instead. Say the plain one and you should get a small movement, less than the aspirated one and more than nothing. Two things make the test work better. Hold the paper close, because a few centimetres of distance hides a small difference. And test the doubled consonant last, aiming for complete stillness rather than for a small movement: the tense series is made with the throat squeezed and the tongue or lips pressed harder and held slightly longer, and if you think of it as the quiet one you will usually reproduce the tightness by accident. The back of your hand works instead of paper, but paper is more sensitive. Use the test as a check rather than a drill: say a word, watch the paper, decide w