Hi theely4465,
Nice to meet you. I am your fellow student "George."
Anyways, on to my question(s). I have the following word:
남자아이가 - which I'm assuming means "boy".
"자" is written to sound like "sa" but is it also common for it to sound like "za" or "ga?" Rosetta Stone seems to make all these sounds depending on the voice actor.
Also, the "아" syllable, do I hold the previous "ah" sound, try to force out a new "ah," or just pretend I didn't see it and skip the sound? R.Stone, to my newbie ear, seems to skip it. Maybe holds it... I'm not sure.
Listening is the hardest part, many times our ears trick us and we cannot hear the sounds correctly until we know that for which we are listening. Don't always trust your ears, because subtle differences in individual speech habits, the speed at which a person speaks, and the quality of sound recording and playback make what you hear inexact at best. I have used Rosetta Stone and the voice quality was ok but not crystal clear. I have found the recorded lessons here at KC101 to be of higher quality, but to a new student of the language with no point of reference the brain tends to interpret the sounds according to patterns familiar to itself. However, pay particular attention when the KC101 lessons do the 'slow mode' because these are quite excellent and exact.
Don't worry if you don't understand the following explanation, just file it in the back of your mind -- it will make sense later.
남자아이 - a compound word meaning 'male child' --yes "boy"
pronunciation:
1. 자 is Ja 'ㅈ' has a J sound
2. yes you start a new Ah sound at 아 (see below for the reason)
남자 -Namja = means 'male' (related word '여자' -Yeoja =female) in this case '남-Nam' specifically means 'male' and '자'-Ja' indicates 'a person'
아이 -Ah-i =means 'child'
가 -Ga (남자아이
가) = in this case is a subject marker indicating that the sentence subject will be about this male child but don't worry too much about these markers at first
Keep up the good work! Here is something I did for fun, not an exact fit but a general guide, that may help you with remembering pronunciation of Hangul (Korean) consonants:
