I had a Korean friend who tried to teach me how to say "pa" sound in Korean, and she told me that there were 5 different ways to say that sound, which she failed to help me distinguish.
Sorry for the late reply, Misa.J!
I wanted to study this before answering; I guess getting questions really makes you learn things. I didn't find much, but ruled out some doubts about my own understanding! LOL
Coming to your first question. Are you sure it wasn't 3 different "pa"s?
All I know is that
Korean has a
three-way-distinction in the consonants.
1.
unvoiced p (like the French p but softer, i.e. without tensing your vocal cords)
발 /pal/ "foot"
2.
tense p (like French p but stronger, i.e. with tensing the vocal cords)
빨 /?pal/ "to suck"
3.
aspirated p (close to English p, which has the strong puffing out of air)
팔 /phal/ "arm"
The difficulty you had with your Korean friend is probably due to the different consonant sets in
Japanese which I hear has a
two-way-distinction;
1.
unvoiced p
2.
voiced b
(I'm a little hesitant to write p because I read somewhere that Japanese P's has changed into F's or H's. Not sure, but this may also have something to do???)
Korean doesn't have tones like Mandarin Chinese; which happens to have 4 distinct tones; high, rising, dipping, and falling; plus one neutral tone which is simply not having any tonality when a character falls on the second syllable. You could say Mandarin Chinese has 5 tones, but that's Mandarin.
And I also wonder whether your friend wasn't including the F and V sounds on top of the 3 Korean p's; with so many loan words from English, French, and what not, quite a few people can pronounce these "foreign varieties of p's." I wonder?
When speakers from two languages having different sound systems hear each other, the effect is not that predictable. It actually takes quite some time being exposed to the sounds until one begins to get some feel for the other's sounds.
What makes Korean dialects so different from each other that you even have a hard time understanding? Is it the accent? Or, are there grammatical differences?
I would have to correct myself about the dialects; there are 6 major Korean dialects, not 8 as I said earlier. Coming to your question, the difficulty I had with my grandfather was both differences in speech sounds and vocabulary. I gradually picked up his vocabulary, but the sound barrier (not the 330m/s barrier of course was impossible to overcome.
There is one major dialect that involves this type of difficulty; it is the dialect of Cheju Island. The Cheju Dialect is quite impossible to understand for mainlanders unless you've lived there for a while. The other major dialects on the Korean peninsula may have a slight accent or a strong intonation but the sounds themselves are not that different.
My difficulty with the regional dialects come mainly from the words. Words are quite varied. I only found out this year that there are at least a dozen ways to say "snail" in Korean. In how many ways can you say "snail" in Japanese?
