~Weekly Korean~ Episode 21: 받침 Explained

안녕하세용~!

I'm so so sorry for abandoning YouTube for like 2 weeks... or maybe even 3 weeks....... :O Second year of university proved to be much harder than I thought and I really had to get my mind out of everything, lock myself in my room and focus focus focus! Being the perfectionist I am, I just have to give it my 100%, which all you students should do too because studying is fun! :D (Yes, I'm that one weird nerdy person who loves to study) 

As for what we'll be covering today, I'm surprised it took me 21 episode to get to this topic, which I really should have gone over a lot earlier. Today we'll be discussing the 받침 or the consonants at the bottom of syllables in Korean. 

Head over to Korean From Zero and download the PDF of their ENTIRE first textbook! It has lots of useful information about 받침 and you can even go through an interactive course on their website as well! 

So when it comes to 받침 we can have ONE or TWO consonants at the end of a syllable. 

SINGLE consonant examples: 

가족- [ka jok] family 

집- [chip] house

곧- [kot] immediately 

Whenever consonants like ㄱ  ㅂ  ㄷ  ㅈ  ㅅ appear as a single consonant in the 받침, they have a very faint sound and serve more to emphasise the end of the word rather than make a sound. Their sound gets stronger when the word appears in a sentence with particles added to them like:

가족이 [ka jo gi] family with an object/subject marking particle 이/가

집은 [chi beun] house with a subject marking particle 은/는

* Letter ㅇ doesn't have a sound when combined with vowels but when it appears in the 받침 it has an "NG" sound. 

양- [yang] sheep

강- [kang] river

멍- [meong] blank

탕- [tang] soup 

DOUBLE consonant examples:

볶음- [bok keum] fried 

있다- [it ta] to be 

FUN FACT: The only double consonant which appear in the 받침 in modern day Korean are the ㄲ and ㅆ. That's it! Woo, less for use to remember :) 

Carry-over rule:

In order to create a flow between syllables in a word, most of the time the sounds of the consonants from the 받침 get carried over to the beginning of the next syllable to create flow. 

암을 is pronounced 아믈 [a meul] - cancer 

밥이 turns into 바비 [pa bi] - food or rice 

EXCEPTION 1: ㄷ or ㅌ + 이

같이 -- 가치 [ka chi] together

EXCEPTION 2: ㅅ + 이 = ㄴ + 이 (??)

나뭇잎 is pronounced 나무닢 [na mu nip]- leaf

CRAZY DOUBLE consonants in the 받침:

닭 [dak]-chicken

읽고 ... [il go] - to read and ...

The carry-over rule still applies so when these syllables are on their own, depending what group they are in, we will either read the first or the second consonant in the 받침 but when combined with other particles or words the sound gets carried over.

Hope that made sense! :) 

Much love,

x