"서울, 부산, 도쿄"
Translation:Seoul, Busan, Tokyo
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ㄷ at the beginning of a word most likely sounds closer to the Japanese "t" to Korean speakers than ㅌ does.
Why it sounds closer needs a more technical explanation:
In general, "t" and "d" are very similar sounds (also the pairs "p"/"b" and "k"/"g"). They're pronounced in the same place in the mouth and they both briefly stop the flow of air, but not all languages distinguish them in the same way. There are two main ways, which linguists call voicing (vibration of the vocal cords in the throat) and aspiration (a puff of air after the sound).
As I understand it, ㄷ at the beginning of a word is unvoiced and unaspirated, while ㅌ is unvoiced and heavily aspirated. For Japanese, "d" is voiced and unaspirated, while "t" is unvoiced and slightly aspirated. That means ㄷ is quite similar to a Japanese "d". Between voiced sounds (like vowels), ㄷ is voiced and sounds more like the Japanese "d", so ㅌ sounds closer to the Japanese "t" in the middle of a word.
There are quite a few Japanese place names which are like this in Korean. For example, Kyoto is 교토 (Gyoto), Kobe is 고베 (Gobe), Toyama is 도야마 (Doyama), Kumamoto is 구마모토 (Gumamoto), Tokushima is 도쿠시마 (Dokusima).
Sometimes its hard to know how to spell stuff in korean like 고양이, it sounds like K oyangi but it is actually in korean goyangi. Also with, 고마워 it sometimes sounds like K omawo and not G omawo
my question is not just about this specific phrase but how are these things helping us learn anything bc its not like we would actually need to use them if we had to speak korean but like i go by the sound that she says and not by looking at the characters and sounding them out and the more that i go into the lessons then im not just gonna need to go by sound, im gonna ave to go by the characters and i already learned the characters before i started learning the combined sounds which you kinda have to in order to get very far without having to go back and doing that but still they should have several lessons at the beginning that are just helping people learn about each individual character and its rules or whatever lol
https://www.howtostudykorean.com/unit0/unit0lesson1/#google_vignette this is really helpful because duolingo doesn't show you that much i got it from another person in the discussion