Some Notes On Tongue Positioning

If you're not concentrating on it, where does your tongue rest in your mouth? According to many native speakers and studies, if you're a native English speaker, odds are your tongue rests on the roof of your mouth. I know, you're probably wondering what this linguistic phenomenon has to do with me learning Korean. Actually, tongue-shaping was one of the biggest light-bulb moments I've had with the language!

English speakers, like myself, rest their tongues predominantly on the roof of their mouths, but Koreans tend to rest their tongues on the bottom. So why is this important? It gives you a completely different home base for where you start constructing words, and it reinforces certain pronunciation rules that might hinder learning how to form certain sounds correctly. The goal is to speak with as little lingering English accent as possible!

For example, I always had trouble with getting my s's and j's sounding like the Korean equivalents until I realized where I was supposed to pronounce from. In Korean, there is no 'si' or 'see' sound; any time an i comes after an s, it automatically corrects to 'shi' (even though it is still written in Roman characters as 'si'). So if you're pronouncing, say, 사 and 시 (sa and si) with an English tongue-shape, you have to move your tongue differently to form the two sounds. The English 'sh' sound is what gave me trouble! But when you focus on moving your tongue to the correct position, you can achieve both sounds with the same exact tongue positioning, and it sounds much more natural. Pretty neat, huh?

Written Korean language, or Hangul (한글), is actually one of the most helpful and sensible writing systems in the world. This is largely because there are main consonants that show you how you are supposed to shape your tongue to pronounce them. There are 5 groups of consonants, each with a designated 'base' consonant that depicts the correct tongue shape, as pictured above. So if we go back to the s example, we see the base consonant ㅅ. ㅅ, or siot, is a dental consonant and should be formed exactly how it looks: the tip of the tongue touches the back of your bottom teeth, the middle goes to the roof of your mouth, and the rest drops back down in the back of your mouth a bit. 

Try pronouncing sa and si in this way now, with the correct Korean tongue-positioning. Isn't it crazy the difference this makes already?

This triangle-tongue-shape trick is also applied to the rest of the dental consonants, ㅆ (ss) , ㅈ (j) , ㅉ (jj), and ㅊ (ch). Certain pronunciation rules like this are even easier to identify in the other 4 consonant groups, which aren't as far removed from English. In knowing how to properly shape the mouth and tongue when you learn a new language, I'm now realizing it makes it so much easier to speak naturally and without an accent. I really enjoyed learning about the guiding features of Hangul and its pronunciation guides, and I hope I've done it justice with my writing!