Errors in the pronunciation of Korean consonants in Vietnamese learners

The purpose of this paper is to examine pronunciation errors in Vietnamese learners’ reading and analyze their causes. Above all, this paper will identify possible errors through contrastive analysis and language transfer to find out what the errors are and find their causes. Since most errors are fundamentally caused by structural differences between the two languages, this paper will analyze their causes through the differences and similarities between Korean and Vietnamese. Among them, this paper would like to discuss the transfer and difficulties from the perspective of contrastive analysis based on pronunciation errors in the tense consonants and tensified consonants of Korean, liquids and the nasalization of the liquid consonant, and voiced consonants and palatalizations in Korean, which are considered difficult for Vietnamese students. First, liquid nasalization errors turned out to be the most difficult for Vietnamese students. This is especially closely related to transfer and seems to have arisen from the tendency to pronounce the original Vietnamese 'ㄹ' l as it is. Second, in the case of tense and tensified consonants, tensified consonant process shows more errors than tense consonants. Third, because the final consonant 'l' is not allowed in Vietnamese, there is an error in pronouncing 'l' as 'n' when pronouncing Korean. Fourth, Korean consonants are basically voiceless. However, voiceless consonants between voiced sounds are pronounced as voiced. However, because Vietnamese has both voiced and voiceless sounds, there is the possibility of Korean voiceless sounds being pronounced as voiced. It was even observed that ‘kyotong’ (traffic) was pronounced gyodong or g’yodong. In conclusion, this paper shows that the differences between the two languages have a significant influence on language errors. To overcome this, it can be said that it is more efficient for language acquisition to reduce the influence of transfer and allow students to recognize the differences and similarities between the two languages through learning.