Korean Job Discussion Forums

[n3ptne]

Ok, so I've been here two months now, and I've so far managed to conquer all of the tricky pronounciation issues except for R & L. During the two months I've been studying Korean with daily lessons, and I, up until this past week, had sort of accepted that they will never be good at making clearly distinguishable R/L sounds. I reasoned that in their language the two sounds combine with the consonant �� and that nothing I was going to do over the span of a few years was going to change their linguistic upbringing. This sat uneasily with me at first, but I went with it, I recall reading an article in college about a native language (in Canada I believe), where if by age 10 you have not learned/been exposed to it, you will never be able to verbally make, or aurally distinguish between a group of sounds. The article stipulated that after age 10 the vocal cords would be so developed, that biologically it wouldn't be possible, and I imagined a sort of similar parallel in Korea. Basically if they say it the same, they'll hear it the same, and mentally, to them, it is the same.

Then I had a class whose word list included "really". I tried over and over again, and they just couldn't adequately say it, but I did notice, after breaking the word down into REE and LEE, that they could (sometimes) make a clearly distinguishable R and L sound, but why not together?

What I ended up doing was finding out the Hangul for "tongue" and "lips". I told my students that the left hand was the lips, and the right hand was the tongue, and not to say anything, but just to watch my hands and mouth. I went on to show them that for R, you don't move your tongue, and that for L you don't move your lips. It took close to 35minutes, and going around the room, having each individual student make the two sounds until they got it (some of them tried over 10 times before doing it, have to do a lot of smiling and saying "its OK, that was good, try again"). Then I wrote on the board these combinations: RE-LE, RO-LO, RI-LI, RU-LU, RA-LA, LE-RE, LO-RO, LI-RI, LU-RU, LA-RA and had them say each, both as a group and then individually. As they got more consistent, we went faster, RO-LO-LO-RO, etc. After our time was up, they could nail "really", and even "favorite" (contains a rather tricky transfer between V/R) almost perfectly. I told them if I closed my eyes they sounded like �̱� children (and this wasn't exactly a lie, they did sound damn good), gotta get the positive reinfocement in.

For homework I made them copy down the combinations on the board and made them promise to practice saying them over the weekend. Most of the children were sullen, the only word for it really, when I started in on the lesson because they had undoubtably been through it before with other foreign teachers to no avail.... but as the hour progressed they got more and more enthused, and, dare I even say confident? I'm eager to see how they fare next week.

Just wondering, has anyone actually gotten it perfect? Or am I getting my hopes up too high and in desperate need of a reversion back to my original line of thinking towards the matter?[/i]