Two Korean Vowels, One Sound — Epoche A2
Dear Mina, How are you? Manchester is grey, as always. The app is still hard, but now the problem is new. Last week it started vowel tests. It plays a word, and you choose the spelling: 개 (dog) or 게 (crab). To me the two words sound exactly the same. I played one pair twenty times, and ten answers were wrong — the same as guessing. On Tuesday there was a Korean student, Hyunwoo, at the language exchange. He listened to the app and laughed. He said my ears are not the problem. In Seoul today, he said, ㅐ and ㅔ sound the same, and nobody his age says them differently. His grandmother maybe did. Koreans learn the spelling of each word, like English people learn "there" and "their". When they write down a new name, he said, they must ask which letter it uses — even Koreans cannot hear it. Is that true? If it is, the app is testing a difference that Seoul stopped making years ago. I will skip those tests and learn the spellings word by word, with a list on the fridge. Please tell me, and please send a photo of your new office. Love, Sarah