English Pronunciation for Korean Speakers

커피 for coffee. 비디오 for video. 데스크 for desk. Korean has borrowed a great many English words, and the Hangul spelling of each one is a small record of how Korean hears English. Read those three back and you get "keopi", "bidio" and "deseukeu": an /f/ turned into /p/, a /v/ into /b/, and a one-syllable word grown to three.

That makes the Korean accent in English unusually easy to map. The official rules for writing foreign words in Hangul spell English /f/ with ㅍ, /v/ with ㅂ, /l/ and /ɹ/ both with ㄹ, and /z/ and /dʒ/ both with ㅈ. Each of those decisions is a pair of English sounds that Korean speakers have to learn to separate, and they are the standard problems for Korean speakers in teaching references such as Jung-Ae Lee's chapter in Swan and Smith's Learner English. The facts about Korean come from standard descriptions of its sound system (see Sources at the end).

About the transcriptions. Every table gives a US and a UK form from a pronunciation lexicon IPAtics maintains, printed exactly as it appears there. The US forms mark stress even in one-syllable words (light is /ˈlaɪt/) but not vowel length; the UK forms mark length with ː and often leave stress out. Both write English r as /ɹ/.

r and l: one Korean letter, two English sounds

Korean ㄹ is one sound with two forms. Between vowels it is a tap, [ɾ], the tongue flicking the ridge behind the teeth once. At the end of a syllable it is [l]. Korean never needs to tell them apart, because the position decides which one you say. English uses the two sounds to separate words, in every position.

You already own the English /l/: it is the ㄹ at the end of 일 or 말. Hold that position, tongue tip pressed on the ridge, and start light from it. The English /ɹ/ is the new sound. The tongue tip touches nothing: curl it back slightly or bunch the tongue up, round the lips a little, and let the voice pass. Between vowels, watch the Korean tap: to an English ear it sounds like the t in American water, not like an r or an l. The page on the English r sound /ɹ/ has more words, and the guide for Japanese speakers covers the same contrast from a language with the same single liquid.

f and p, v and b

Korean has neither /f/ nor /v/. Loanwords write /f/ with ㅍ, the aspirated p, and /v/ with ㅂ, the plain b. As a result, English listeners may hear pan for fan and berry for very.

Both new sounds use the same position: the upper teeth rest lightly on the lower lip, and the air pushes through the gap. With no voice it is /f/; with voice it is /v/. The lips never close, which is the whole difference from /p/ and /b/. Practise in front of a mirror and check that you can see your upper teeth on every f and v. The page on /v/ has more words to practise.

z and j

Korean has no /z/, and loanwords write it with ㅈ, the same letter they use for the j of jam: jazz is 재즈 and zone is 존. So English /z/ often comes out as /dʒ/, and zone sounds like Joan.

English /z/ is /s/ with the voice switched on. The tongue does not touch the roof of the mouth at any point. Say a long "sssss", then switch on your voice without moving your tongue, with two fingers on your throat to feel the buzz. /dʒ/ starts with the tongue closed against the ridge, so if your z starts with a stop, it has become j.

s and sh before ee

In Korean, /s/ changes before /i/: ㅅ in 시 is said [ɕ], close to English sh. English keeps /s/ and /ʃ/ apart before every vowel, so see can come out as she.

Keep the tongue tip forward, just behind the upper teeth, and the lips spread in a smile through the whole word. If you feel the tongue slide back as the vowel starts, start again with a longer, sharper hiss.

th

Loanwords write /θ/ with ㅅ and /ð/ with ㄷ, so thing tends toward sing and then toward den.

Put the tip of your tongue lightly between your teeth and blow: that is /θ/. Add your voice for /ð/. The air must keep flowing; a full stop turns it into /d/. Our guide to the two TH sounds explains which words take which.

The extra vowel: desk, film, strike

A Korean syllable has at most one consonant before the vowel (plus a glide) and one after it, and only seven consonant sounds can close it: /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/ and /l/, with the stops unreleased. When an English word breaks those rules, Korean adds the vowel ㅡ [ɯ] to give each extra consonant a syllable of its own. The official spellings show where.

Every English word in the table has one syllable. The last row shows the pattern is not random: after a short vowel, a final /p/, /t/ or /k/ becomes a Korean final consonant, and no vowel is added. Yoonjung Kang's study of English loanwords in Korean explains which final stops get the extra vowel by how closely each Korean form matches what a Korean listener hears in the English word.

Saying English the loanword way adds beats the listener does not expect. Strike with five syllables no longer sounds like strike. Two fixes help. For clusters at the start, begin with a long hiss, "sssss-trike", and shorten the /s/ until no vowel fits between it and the /t/. For endings, stop on the consonant and let it fade: no ㅡ after the /k/ of desk, even a whisper of one. When the next word starts with a vowel, link to it, desk is as "des-kis", and the consonant has a vowel to lean on.

Vowels: bad and bed, ship and sheep

For most South Korean speakers, the two letters ㅐ and ㅔ, once different vowels, are now said the same way. English needs two vowels in that space: /æ/ in bad and /ɛ/ in bed. For most speakers, vowel length no longer separates Korean words either, so English pairs that differ in length and quality can merge.

For /æ/, drop the jaw well below your ㅐ and keep the tongue forward. For /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, start from Korean 이 and 우 and make them shorter and looser, with the tongue slightly lower. Our list of English minimal pairs every learner confuses has more pairs for each.

Stress and rhythm

Standard Korean does not mark one syllable of a word as stressed the way English does: pitch patterns belong to phrases. English picks one syllable per word, makes it louder, longer and often higher, and shrinks most of the others to the schwa /ə/. Loanwords make this harder, because their extra vowels add even beats.

Christmas has two syllables in English and chocolate usually has two, and in each the stress falls on the first. Banana keeps three syllables, but only the middle one has a full vowel. The UK entries leave stress unmarked, but it falls in the same place. The guide to the English schwa covers the weak vowel in detail.

For teachers: what to drill first

1. r and l, f and p, v and b. They separate a great many everyday words, and the loanword spellings your students know point the wrong way. Use the minimal pairs above with the mirror test.
2. The extra vowel. Count syllables with the class: desk is one beat, not three. This changes the shape of the word more than any single sound.
3. z, s before ee, and th. Short drills with the pairs above.
4. Vowels. bad and bed first, then the length pairs.
5. Stress. Put the transcription on the board and show where the schwas are.

Many English words reach Korean students as loanwords first, so it helps to say plainly that the loanword is a Korean word now, with Korean sounds, and the English word is a different one. Our page for ESL teachers and tutors covers IPA worksheets and minimal-pair drills.

Trying it yourself

The words you meet every day are the practice. IPAtics is a desktop app that shows the IPA for any text you select, in any app, and plays the word, so you can check an r, an l or a stress mark while you read. To convert text in the browser, paste it into the English to IPA converter. The free IPA Anki decks include a deck of English minimal pairs, and the IPA keyboard lets you type the symbols for your notes. The guide for Vietnamese speakers covers another language that adds or drops sounds around clusters.

Sources

• Lee, Jung-Ae. "Korean speakers." In Michael Swan and Bernard Smith (eds.), Learner English: A Teacher's Guide to Interference and Other Problems, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 325–342. doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511667121.023.
• Kang, Yoonjung. "Perceptual similarity in loanword adaptation: English postvocalic word-final stops in Korean." Phonology 20(2), 2003, pp. 219–273. doi.org/10.1017/S0952675703004524.
• 외래어 표기법 (the Korean rules for writing foreign words), Ministry of Education Notice 85-11, 1986, maintained by the National Institute of Korean Language: the full text with the examples desk 데스크, nest 네스트, film 필름, jazz 재즈 and book 북, and the Institute's note on writing /f/, /v/, /l/, /ɹ/ and /z/.
• Wikipedia, "Korean phonology": the two forms of ㄹ, /s/ before /i/, the merger of ㅐ and ㅔ, vowel length, the seven final consonants, syllable structure and pitch.