Telling Apart ㅂ/ㅍ/ㅃ | Korean Pronunciation Explained

What's up guys and welcome back to All Things Korean. In this episode, I'm going to teach you how to tell apart the three consonants ㅂ, ㅍ, and ㅃ. So if you've watched my previous videos on how to tell apart similar sounding consonants, I will link those down below. You might notice that there's a pattern that's going on. Usually it's going to be a group of three consonants that have a similar sound. And the features that distinguish all three of them are usually the same for all these trios. So you have one that is a lax sound. This is just the basic neutral sound. Then you have an aspirated sound. And then you have what is called a double consonant or a tensed sound. The concept is pretty much the same, but the drills or the examples that I'm going to be providing are obviously a bit different because of the different places of articulation. I'm just telling you this because a lot of the information that I'm giving you today might sound very repetitive if you have watched my past videos. So jumping right into the topic of today, the three consonants ㅂ, ㅍ, and ㅃ are what we call bilabial stops. And what that means is bilabial. The sound is made when your two lips are touching like M or B or P. And it's called a stop because unlike M where you can continue the airflow through your nose, this is called a stop because at one point the airflow is completely blocked. So for all three consonants, the airflow is completely blocked and the sound is made by your two lips touching together. But what are the differences between the three consonants? Let's take a look into it now. So we're going to start with the lax or the most basic of the three, which is ㅂ. For practical purposes, I'm going to add the vowel ㅏ and call them ㅍ, ㅍ, and ㅃ throughout the video. So starting with ㅍ, if we look at how it's romanized, it's either a B or a P. But the truth is it's neither, which is why you should never rely on romanization as I always like to emphasize, romanization is not helpful. But anyway, let's see why it can be romanized as either B or a P. So before we do that, I'm going to look at the differences between the English consonants B and P before we look into the Korean consonant. So the key features that distinguish the English B and P are voicing and aspiration. Voicing refers to the vibration of your vocal cord when you articulate that particular sound. So let's compare ㅂ and ㅍ. When you say ㅂ, ㅂ, you're going to feel that there is a vibration in your throat from the get-go. However, when you say the English ㅍ, ㅍ, you will notice that there is a slight delay in the vibration. And this is because the P is not a voiced consonant, whereas B is. The other thing to look at is aspiration, which refers to that strong burst of air that comes out of your mouth. So when you say ㅂ, ㅂ, there isn't that strong burst of air. But when you say ㅍ, ㅍ, you will feel the strong burst of air on your hand. Now, where does the Korean ㅍ come in? It sounds like a ㅂ, it sounds like a ㅍ, it's somewhere in between, right? Let's first compare ㅍ to the English ㅂ. Both of them are similar in that they are not aspirated, or at least not as much as P. The Korean ㅍ is not completely unaspirated, but it has minimal aspiration. The difference between the Korean ㅍ and the English ㅂ is the voicing. The Korean ㅍ is not voiced. So when you say ㅍ in Korean, you are going to feel the delay in the vibration of your vocal cords. However, when you compare the Korean ㅍ with the English ㅍ, what they have in common is that both of those consonants are not voiced. So as I just mentioned before, you have that delay in the vibration of your vocal cords. But the biggest difference between the Korean ㅍ and the English ㅍ is the level of aspiration. When you say the English ㅍ, there's a very strong burst of air and it's very obvious. But when you say the Korean ㅍ, I do feel a little bit of air. But it's definitely nowhere near as ㅍ. So what you can do is take a tissue or your hand and try to say ㅍ with lesser aspiration and see the difference in how much air you feel. Try to see if you can tell the difference between ㅍ, ㅍ, ㅍ, ㅍ. The aspirated ㅍ also tends to be a little higher in pitch. Now just a couple of seconds ago, I told you that the Korean ㅍ is an unvoiced consonant. There are times when it is voiced and that's when it's in the middle of a word between two vowels. So when you hear the word, for example, 바보, which means idiot. So the ㅍ in the first syllable, 바보, that's the ㅍ that I've been talking about all throughout this video. It's the one that is unvoiced with minimal aspiration. But when you say ㅂ, 바보, 바보, ㅂ, then it becomes a voiced consonant. So when it's in the middle of a word, it is easier to just think of it as the English B. But when it's at the first, the initial, at the head of a word, then it's this weird neutral sound that is somewhere in between the B and the P. No voicing, minimal aspiration, ㅍ, 바보. It's not 파보, it's not 바보, it's 바보. Okay, next we are going to look at the aspirated consonant, which is ㅍ or ㅍ. This is pretty much the same as the English P.A., ㅍ. They are aspirated, they are unvoiced, and I can't really tell the difference between the two. Some examples are 파도, which means wave, and 파랑, which is the color blue. Now let's look at the infamous double consonant, or the tensed consonant, 쌍ㅂ or 빠. This consonant is also unaspirated. It's tensed right before articulation. And what this tensed means, so I want you to think about how you say the word, hop, like let's hop on a boat. When you pronounce the word hop in English, you don't release the P with aspiration. There's no release of air when you say it. You don't say hop, hop. We say hop, hop. It stays in this tensed state, hop. So from that state, you want to pronounce your B. So think of the way you say the word, let's say snapback, like a snapback cat. So snapback. So when you say snap, your lips or your mouth, it stays tensed before you pronounce the word back. So you don't say snapback, you say snapback. So you're going to notice that the B in back is a bit more tenser. It's pronounced a bit more strongly than normal because you had that tensed state from the P in snap. I'm going to give you two examples in English that might help you distinguish what this double consonant sounds like. The first one is happy. When you say the word happy, do you aspirate it? No, you don't say happy. I'm happy. You say I'm happy. It's not a B. You don't say I'm happy. You say happy. And that's the tensed double consonant sound, happy. Another example that might help you is the word spa. Likewise, you don't aspirate this P when you say the word. You don't say spa. So try to say spa and take out that first S sound and you'll end up with spa. And lastly, like I always do with my other consonants, I'll give you some examples that exist in other languages. First of all, let's look at the Spanish dish paella. It starts with a P, but it's not an aspirated P. We don't say paella. If we try all three bilabial stops in Korean, it's not paella. It's not paella, but it's paella. The second and last example I'm going to give you today is the Mandarin Chinese word for the number eight, ba. So again, let's try all three bilabial stops and you tell me if you speak Mandarin Chinese, which ones sounds the most natural. I'll try saying five, six, seven, eight. So you have wu liu qi pa. No, wu liu qi pa. No, wu liu qi ba. So that ba is the closest to the double consonant, tensed consonant, san pi yip ba that we are trying to master today. So to wrap it up, the lax consonant pa or pi yip can be romanized as a B or a P. It's a neutral sound that is not voiced and has minimal aspiration. Pa or pi yip is a strongly aspirated version. It's romanized as a P. And the double consonant san pi yip or ba is romanized as a double P or a double B. And it's a consonant that is tensed before articulation. Some examples you can use to help you are the words happy and spa. And that's all I have for today. I hope you found this video useful and informative and helpful. The final consonant pronunciation video I'm going to make is for cha, cha, and ja. I'm not sure when I'm going to make it, but I will try to have that ready for you soon. If you found this video helpful, please give it a thumbs up. Let me know in the comments what you thought, what other videos you would like to see. And if you just want to stick around for more videos on Korean language and culture, then please subscribe to this channel. And I will see you in the next one. 다음 영상에서 만나요!