Teach English in Tangcheng Zhen - Linfen Shi

South Korea is one of the many countries on earth that do not use the Latin alphabet in their written language. Instead they employ the use of Hangul which has a distinctly different written structure, letters, and phonetic rules. Letters that exist in English do no exist in Korean and vice versa. For example the letters Z,V,F,X, and Q do not exist at all in Korean. Other letters such as D/T, R/L, G/K, B/P, J/CH, and S/SH are differentiated but only slightly, often without the harsh and distinct pronunciation differences found in English. R/L in particular presents a unique challenge for Korean students as they are the same letter in Korean and thus there is no way of differentiating them using the Hangul alphabet. The letter denoting ING in Hangul can also be used to denote a silent letter which is distinctly different from how letters, especially consonants, are used in English. Letters such as W and Y only exist when connected to vowel sounds (such as Wa, Wo, Ya, or Yo). In fact, all consonants and vowels must be paired when speaking, even when reciting the alphabet they do not simply say B as we would in English, instead they say the phonetic equivalent of Byupt (the literal name of the Hangul letter as opposed to the sound it makes). As I previously stated there are also letters that exist in Korean that do not exist in English; these include BB, DD, SS, and JJ these sounds exist somewhere between B and P, D and T, S and SH, and J and CH. Often times they can cause confusion when looking at romanized words. In Korean each letter also only makes one sound; there is no such thing as soft and hard consonants or long and short vowels, such differentiations in sound require the use of entirely different letters. It is for this reason that though Korean is missing five English consonants entirely and has only one letter for six pairs that require two letters in English there are only two less Hangul letters than Latin ones. In practice the pronunciation problem that most commonly plagues South Korean students is an inability to distinguish between certain letters or a misuse of long/short hard/soft consonant and vowel sounds where the other is appropriate. The most difficult words are ones such as Right and Light which students often cannot distinguish between or words such as Fire or Fashion which are often pronounced with Ps (Pire and Passion). Students can often struggle with words with connected consonants because in Korean every consonant must be followed by a vowel. This can often result in added vowel sounds between consonants or at the ends of words (snake becomes snake-oo). This can be particularly problematic with words that exist as loan words in Korean such as sandwich which when pronounced in Korean becomes sAEndOOwichEE. Loan words can present unique challenges for teachers and students because the pronunciation known to Korean students is right in their language and they often think of it as the correct English pronunciation as well because they know it is an English word. Thus teachers have to explain the new correct pronunciation while also breaking the habit of the Korean pronunciation while speaking English. With whole sentences too students can often struggle with inflection as Korean sentence structure follows a Subject - Object - Verb formula instead of the common English Subject - Verb - Object formula. This can result in stress placed on the wrong words and thus unnatural sentence pronunciation. Overall the differences in Korean writing structure, sentence structure, and alphabet pronunciation rules can cause a lot of problems for students and teachers but these are not insurmountable and can be overcome with effective teaching.