Pronunciation Errors and Strategies by Korean L2 learners of Mongolian

The main purpose of this paper is to offer a typological observation of possible errors in the pronunciation of Mongolian sounds by Korean learners of Mongolian. It is examined that pronunciation errors are mainly attributed to different phonemic inventories and phonological features between the Korean language (native language) and the Mongolian language (target language). According to contrastive analysis, Mongolian voiced and palatalized stops are the most difficult sounds for Korean learners to acquire because there is no corresponding segments in Korean. With regard to laryngeal features, Korean obstruents are contrastive depending on the markedness of Glottal Width (GW) whereas Mongolian obstruents are marked with either Glottal Width (GW) or Glottal Tension (GT). Thus, Mongolian laryngeal system is more complicated than Korean one. This may induce Korean learners to have difficulty in learning Mongolian obstruents. In addition to the segmental differences between the two languages, suprasegmental factors, such as syllable types and vowel length, can prevent Korean learners from acquiring the pronunciation of Mongolian sounds. For example, Mongolian allows a consonant cluster in coda position, which may lead Korean learners to insert epentheic vowels in between adjacent consonants. In Mongolian, vowel length is a distinctive feature to distinguish long vowels from short ones. However, the distinction between long and short vowels is insignificant in Korean. This paper also addresses that the Grammar-Translation method and Audio-lingual method that are popular in teaching foreign languages do not help Korean learners learn how to pronounce Mongolian phonemes. An alternative teaching method, the Silent Way seems to have benefited most by associating sounds with certain symbols, which allows Korean learners to facilitate an insight into Mongolian phonemes.