About
Who writes this
I'm Jun Mi Jung. I live in Gwangju, South Korea.
I worked as a voice actor, and I'm a certified speech instructor — I used to teach. Both jobs were the same job seen from two sides: how a sound is actually made in the body, and what changes for the listener when you make it slightly differently.
For a while I ran pronunciation training for people who wanted to become voice actors. In one group in the Jeolla region, nine out of ten of them could not produce 의 — and Korean was their first language. That is roughly when I stopped assuming any sound is obvious.
I stopped doing both for health reasons. When I could no longer do work that needed my body, I went looking for work I could do at a computer, and ended up teaching myself to build things.
Why Korean, and why for you
I kept hearing that people abroad had become interested in Korean. I went to look, and what I found surprised me — there were so many people who loved my country and my language. I was grateful, and I wanted to help.
So I asked a simple question: which sounds are hardest for you?
The answers came in faster than I could read them. I spent about ten hours writing back to people one at a time — what their mouth was probably doing, what to change, what to listen for.
It became the top post in that community that day. Sixty-six comments, and not a single downvote — which is the part I keep coming back to. People don't pile onto a question that already has an answer.
Some of them wrote back afterwards. One had been stuck on the same sound for ten years. Another said something years of study had never fixed came right in a few minutes.
I don't say that to boast. I say it because of what it told me: these were never hard problems. They were unexplained ones. They are the things a speech teacher fixes in the first week — and these learners had been carrying them for years, because nobody had ever said it plainly.
This blog exists to close that gap.
About the English
I don't speak English. Everything here I write in Korean, and it reaches you with the help of machine translation. If a sentence reads a little oddly, that is why. The judgment and the explanation are mine; the English is borrowed. It was the only way I had to reach you.
What I write, and what I don't
Pronunciation — how Korean sounds are actually produced: where the tongue sits, what the breath does, and why romanization cannot tell you any of that.
Nuance — 눈치, 정, 답정너, 애교체: words that are less vocabulary than social instruction.
I'm not teaching anymore, and this isn't a course. Where usage splits by region or generation, I say that it splits rather than flattening it into a rule. If I get something wrong, tell me — Korean speakers disagree about nuance all the time, and I would rather be corrected than confident.