funeralxempire wrote:
Hangul is a very straightforward writing system, 24 letters with 10 of them being vowels.
You might be right; I don't know Korean. But I did read that it's a tonal language. Which I think means the same written character can be pronounced in multiple tones, where each tone means a different thing.
It's like a therapist saying "aww" when you talk about being emotionally abused by your parents. It could mean many different things: they're mocking you, they saying emotional abuse is cute, they're asking you for more information, etc. But regardless of what their tone means, it's on YOU to figure it out. And they'll never tell you if you ask what it means, because you're expected to JUST KNOW. But while in therapy you can always err on the side of guardedness, in real-life spoken tonal languages, there's no "default" tone; even the flat tone is just a way of pronouncing a character.
Chinese textbooks for foreigners use arrows written above the characters or numbers in superscripts to show tones: there's "rising", "falling", "flat", and maybe more. But Chinese texts for natives have no such arrows. I'm not sure how Korean textbooks handle tones.
I heard fellow Americans say that when a native Chinese or Korean speaker talks to them, they feel like they're being shouted at. That's a byproduct of someone with a tonal-language mindset speaking a non-tonal language. They're probably trying to find the "right" tone in English, where no such concept exists. So it comes of as "shouting". Native Japanese speakers, on the other hand, don't seem to "shout" when speaking English.
Last edited by Aspie1 on 16 Feb 2022, 9:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.