PAK Young-soo. 1998. English Sounds and the Degree of Their Acquiring Difficulty. Studies in Modern Grammar 13, 79-106. This paper has intended to analyze the sounds of English and Korean including segmental and suprasegmental phonemes, and make a contrastive analysis between the sound systems of two languages, finally attempting to measure the degree of difficulty for Korean speakers to acquire English sounds. First, the vowels and consonants of two languages are accurately described, and allophonic variations are represented with phonological rules. In order to make a contrastive analysis of English and Korean, 8-order contrastive situations are set up, downgradingly from 1 to 8. In analyzing vowels average formant frequency of both English and Korean is used. The result of contrastive analysis of both languages is aligned according to 8-order contrastive situations. English vowels are allotted to the orders 1-2-4-7-8, but the nature of difficulty is relatively simple. The situation of consonants is somewhat different. The English consonants are allotted to the orders 1-2-3-4-7-8. But the orders 2, 3, 4 each has three subdivisions among themselves. This means that consonant sounds are complicated and presents more difficulty to Korean speakers. In order to prove the validity of these phonological orders, a test has been made with /b, s, d/ (order 7), /v, θ, ð/(order 2), and /r, l/(dark `l`: order 1, retroflexed `r`: order 2). The result roughly corresponds with the order theoretically set up: the achievement of order 7 sounds is much higher than that of order 2. The difference of syllable structure of English and Korean generally lies in the combinations of consonants and vowels. The structure of Korean syllable is (C)V(C), while English can have a structure of (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) combination. As a result, Korean speakers are liable to insert vowels between English consonants, creating Foreignism. Each English word has its own stressed syllable, and the speaker of Kyungsang dialect has his own stress pattern: that is, puts stress on penultimate syllable as in *sha´mpoo, *gu´itar, etc. This stress pattern of Kyungsang dialect causes errors in the pronunciation of its speakers, as evidenced by the frequent erroneous pronunciation of everyday words like recent, orchard, insect, etc. The difficulty of English rhythm arises from the inherent difference of two languages: English keeps stress-timed rhythm and Korean syllable-timed rhythm. The average achievement of a performance test by 62 college freshmen with 20 short utterances is 44.7%, which indicates the difficulty of English rhythm to Korean speakers. This paper has made a rather thorough contrastive analysis between English and Korean sounds. Especially, with regard to syllable structure and prosodernes, extensive field tests have been made. Hopefully the result of this research can be utilized in effective teaching of English to Korean students.

• 박영수 | Young Soo Pak