# f/v sound - difficult for native Korean speakers?



## Whodunit

VirtuousV said:


> I am sorry my very first post is off-topic, but if the couple you mentioned in Lost are Sun and Jin Kwon, they are Koreans, not Japanese.


 
Haha, that might be the reason why I couldn't follow their words and the subtitles simultaneously. They simply didn't match.  



> By the way, I myself learned the IPA when I first learned English in middle school. Although I still have accents in my English pronunciation, learning the IPA (with all the crazy tongue pictures and vowel charts) helped a lot distinguishing different sounds. (Actually the system helped even more when I learned French in high school.)


 
To come back to the original topic: Do you think the English sounds [f] and [v] are difficult for native Korean speakers? They shouldn't be, because the sound [φ] doesn't exist in Korean.


----------



## Nuclear Grenade

The koreans do mix L and R a lot. Is V difficult? Yes. So in both Japanese and Korean, my name Evan becomes Eban, or Ebun. They can use F though.


----------



## MarcB

Also p and f are hard in Korean.


----------



## Whodunit

And why? Isn't there a Korean syllable that contains the sounds [f] or [v]?


----------



## Flaminius

No, Korean does not have /f/ or /v/.


----------



## Nuclear Grenade

sometimes the f and the h are sort of interchangable.


----------



## VirtuousV

/f/ and /v/ sound do not exist in Korean. 

/f/ is usually represented with /p/ (sort of) sound in borrowed words, but sometimes /wh/ might be used (although not "official" way of transliterating), so "fantasy," for example, may be written as 판타지 (pan-ta-ji) or 환타지 (whan-ta-ji) in Korean. (Note that there is no /z/ sound either, so /j/ is used as a substitute.)

/v/ is represented with /b/ (again, sort of) sound. "Victory" will be written as 빅토리 (bik-to-ri). The English alphabet V is, however, is written as 브이 (beu-i) to prevent confusion with B, which is written as 비 (bi).


----------

