The English language lacks

In Dutch it’s nee (pronounced like nay).

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I like using Hindi to explain pronunciations to myself or anyone else who knows because it’s got almost all the sounds you need! :smile: don’t have to worry about the three different types of deals :joy:
My Korean learning notebook is filled with Hindi spellings instead of romanization because it makes things waaaay more convenient

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I sometimes use Hangeul to explain pronunciation of Dutch words to my Korean friend, but Hangeul lacks in options, so I need to get creative and make words consisting of two different alphabets or explane further.

It should work with the Arabic alphabet, but then again, my knowledge of that is not so far from zero, haha.

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Wow, you ladies have been busy! “네” when used as a response to a question is generally an agreement. It can mean “yes”, “I see/I understand”, “That’s right.”, etc. However, “네?” can also mean “Excuse me?”, “Are you sure?”, etc. when used as a response to a statement.

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For Korean natives, the words that are most troublesome are the ones involving “th”, “r”, and “rl”. I still have trouble saying “rural” and “world” so “World War” is like a tongue twister for me.:joy:

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Exactly, I feel the same.
It’s difficult for other language speakers to get across Korean vowels but we already have a bunch of them except ‘으’ in Hindi. I sometimes feel too proud of myself for choosing Hindi :joy:

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I am really interested in Arabic and am trying to learn it since a few months now but the Arabic sounds on Duolingo scare me at night :sweat_smile:

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In the time when I was doing Korean on Duolingo everyday, there was a sentence frequently coming back about a woman who threw her bed to the other side of the room (or something like that).
Then one night, in my sleep, I threw my pillow away! :rofl:

We have a lot of that sound in Dutch. But we also have a lot of sounds that Koreans don’t have and some of them you can’t even find in English.

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I suppose World War would turn into Word Wall?

That’s probably the reason why multilinguals are always ahead :wink:

Ah, don’t even get me started on these. I once got a sentence “My cow gives me white liquid milk” :woman_facepalming:

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And for Germans it’s the Korean “r”. Germans speak the “r” in the throat and not with the tongue. I thought I would break my tongue when I tried to speak it for the first time :rofl: And one of our Korean friends, who studied in California before, told us, to learn the Spanish “r” was so easy for him. My face would have won the first place for astonishement :joy: Suddendly, after 30 years, I understood, why my former Spanish teacher told us again and again, we all would pronounce the “r” wrong. But she never mentioned, not even once, that we should use our tongue. I couldn’t believe it and asked my Spanish cousin, if he speaks the “r” with his tongue or throat. And he laughed so hard, of course with the tongue.

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@mirjam_465 and @somejuwels, I guess “r” may cause a problem for many languages in different ways. I think for Koreans “r” sound is easier to learn in Japanese and Spanish than English because of the way it’s pronounced. Occasionally, I see the “r” simply being dropped for ease of pronunciation. For example, in the K-drama Alice, they mention “wormhole” a lot which in Korean is written as “웜홀”, basically “r” being dropped to sound closer to “wohmhole”.

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I think you’re right. Dutch has a few variations of the r, mostly depended on the region, which are all accepted and understood. My r is similar to the Korean r.
I never had a problem with the Spanish and Finnish r (both rolling in the front of the mouth), even though they are a lot stronger than my own r, but the French and Portuguese r (rolling in the back of the mouth) always was a pain and it took years before I was able to produce it. Funny enough my mom used to be great at pronouncing the French r, even though she didn’t speak French.
The English r never was a problem for me either.

Indeed! Koreanized English words ending in -er in Korean usually end in -어.
And the Korean title of Born Again was 본 어게인!

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“Koreanized” English brings up another point. Koreans love using English words and names that are often times pronounced far differently than the originals which make them harder to recognize for fluent English speakers. For example, “Brad” in the name “Brad Pitt” is pronounced more like “Bread” and “caramel” is pronounced more like “kah-ra-mel”.

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That’s also how the Dutch say it, though there is some variation among Dutch people: some put the stress on the first syllable, some on the last.
But English has different variations as well:

I guess the pronunciation also has to do with the spelling rules. If we would insist on an r in “born”, then it would be 버른 and that would still sound quite different from the English pronunciation.

Now I’m suddenly reminded that our Danish teacher used to have trouble pronouncing the r in the Dutch word “zwart” (black).

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In German you say “Kah-ra-mell” with long “a” like in “Carmel” :grinning:

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i think its really cute sometimes how they say stuff like pasta as pa-su-ta and english names like Olivia become Ol-ee-bia :joy: Is it because they aren’t used to saying vowels/ consonants together, since each syllable is either consonant-vowel-consonant or vowel-consonant? (in pa-ST a the ST becomes su-ta and in ‘ag-AIN’ the AI breaks into ge-in)

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They say it the way they write it and they have to write it according to their spelling rules. And so words like “blue” and “black” suddenly have 2 syllables!

And since they have no f or v, they might call you “pipi_1485”! :rofl:

But the AI in again becomes EI and that’s pronounced as AY in PLAY, so it’s one sound. A diphtong, but still one sound.

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ok, fun fact: Vivi isn’t my name, it’s the name of one of my favourite band members’ dog-- so… he DOES call her Bibi and the spelling is 비비 :joy::joy:
my username is actually an inside joke, so I didn’t expect people to start calling me that, but I don’t mind :sweat_smile: Google ‘Vivi dog’ and you’ll get hundreds of images of a cute Bichon Frise pup!

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This one?

afbeelding

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