Turkish → Korean
Korean uses 34 sounds. You already own 20 of them from Turkish. The other 14 are the work — and 13 of those are the dangerous kind: close enough to something you already say that you will substitute them without hearing yourself do it.
The silent swaps
Your mouth has something close enough to reach for. These survive for years precisely because they sound right to you — the fix is hearing the difference first, not trying harder.
the move: postalveolar → alveolo-palatal
Korean: house · written "ㅈ (initial)"
Plain ㅈ — between English ch and j, with the tongue flat. Voiced to /d͡ʑ/ between vowels.
Your /t͡ʃ/ is the one in çay (tea).
the move: postalveolar → alveolo-palatal
Korean: very · written "ㅈ (between vowels)"
Your /d͡ʒ/ is the one in cami (mosque).
the move: postalveolar → alveolo-palatal
Korean: time · written "ㅅ before i, y-vowels"
The sh of Japanese shi, not the sh of English ship — tongue flat.
Your /ʃ/ is the one in şeker (sugar).
the move: aspirated
Korean: arm; eight · written "ㅍ"
Aspirated — a strong puff of air. The p of English 'pot'.
Your /p/ is the one in pul (stamp).
the move: close, but not identical
Korean: bread · written "ㅃ"
Tense: the throat stiffens, the release is sharp and there is no puff at all. The third kind of p. Also what plain ㅂ becomes after an obstruent (입구 ipk͈u).
Your /p/ is the one in pul (stamp).
the move: close, but not identical
Korean: strawberry · written "ㄸ"
Tense t. 달 tal 'moon', 탈 tʰal 'mask', 딸 t͈al 'daughter' — one triplet to hear the three-way contrast on.
Your /t/ is the one in tuz (salt).
the move: aspirated
Korean: nose · written "ㅋ"
Your /k/ is the one in kara (land / black).
the move: close, but not identical
Korean: flower · written "ㄲ"
Tense k. Also what plain ㄱ becomes after an obstruent: 학교 hakk͈jo.
Your /k/ is the one in kara (land / black).
the move: close, but not identical
Korean: uncooked rice · written "ㅆ"
Tense s: longer, harder, no breath. 살 sal 'flesh; to live' against 쌀 s͈al 'rice'.
Your /s/ is the one in su (water).
the move: close, but not identical
Korean: why · written "ㅘ ㅝ ㅙ ㅞ ㅚ ㅟ (the w-)"
The w-vowels are written as two vowel letters stacked: ㅘ = ㅗ + ㅏ. ㅚ and ㅙ and ㅞ have all become /we/.
Your /j/ is the one in yol (road).
the move: postalveolar → alveolo-palatal, aspirated
Korean: tea; car · written "ㅊ"
Your /t͡ʃ/ is the one in çay (tea).
Words you may say identically
Two or more Korean sounds landing on one sound of yours. Until the ear separates them, the mouth cannot — which is what the ear trainer is for.
- p = pʰ = p͈ → your p vs vs train this pair →
- t = tʰ = t͈ → your t vs vs train this pair →
- k = kʰ = k͈ → your k vs vs train this pair →
- t͡ɕ = t͡ɕʰ = t͡ɕ͈ → your t͡ʃ vs vs
- s = s͈ → your s vs train this pair →
- j = w → your j vs
Genuinely new
Nothing in Turkish sits close to these. They sound foreign in your mouth — which is the good news: you can hear that you are not saying them yet.
Seoul
An unrounded open o — the vowel of English 'cut' but further back. Romanised eo, which misleads everyone; it is one vowel.
Closest thing you own: — but close-mid → open-mid, unrounded.
Rhythm and pitch
The layer spelling never records, and the one that makes a correct sentence still sound foreign.
| Turkish | Korean | |
|---|---|---|
| Rhythm | Syllable-timed, rising to the end | Syllable-timed, phrase melody |
| Stress | Regular by default: the last syllable, and it travels rightwards as suffixes are added (kiTAP, kitapLAR, kitaplarDAN). The exceptions are what make it a real system. Place names are stressed early, on a pattern borrowed from their shape (ANkara, İsTANbul, İZmir); many adverbs and old loans stay on the first syllable (ŞIMdi, YArın, LOkanta); and some suffixes refuse the stress and push it onto the syllable before them — the negative -me-/-ma- above all, so that the same letters can be a noun or a command. | None at word level. No syllable is reduced and no vowel becomes a schwa; every syllable is said in full. What an English ear hears as stress is the phrase-initial rise. |
What you have that Korean doesn't
11 sounds with no job in Korean. They are not mistakes — but they are where an accent leaks in, because a sound you own is easy to use when a hard one is due.
The honest caveat
This is a prediction from the shape of two sound systems, not a recording of you. It says what your inventory makes likely — it cannot know that your Turkish has a regional variety that already owns one of these, or that you learned Korean from someone whose accent you copied. A teacher listening to you beats it. Use it to know what to listen for.
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