Korean will always be a tricky language for me. I was always able to speak Korean, but I didn’t learn how to read and write Hangeul until fifth grade. Since then, it’s been both a painful and joyful learning experience. Yes, it’s great that I can read and write it, but there will be certain aspect of the language that will drive me insane to the point of wanting to bash something.

For me, the most frustrating thing about Hangeul is these two vowel characters:ᅢ (ae) and ᅦ (e). When I learned these for the first time in fifth grade, they confused me. Phonetically, they sound the same. Graphically, they are not the same. Therefore, whenever I need to write something that uses one of those vowels, I usually end up using the wrong one. Frustrated? That I most certainly am.

Luckily, though, I finally figured out exactly when to differentiate the two vowels in two circumstances, and hopefully I’ll learn more in the future.

1) Any verb that ends in 하다 (hada), like 사랑하다 (sarang hada = to love), when conjugated to 해요 form will always use ᅢ, so it will be 사랑해요.

2) My name, which is pronounced like TERRA! XD A lot of people want to write it like 태라 (Taera), but I prefer 테라 (Tera). It’s entirely a personal preference and both are acceptable, but I prefer the latter one.

Ah, the joy of the EHs. So confusing. My friends, who speaks Korean, and I always talk about how these two vowels frustrates us. Again, I am not claiming to be a linguist. I am just writing this from a bilingual speaker’s POV to show the complicatedness of a language that I respect, but at the same, a language that will be the death of me because of its somewhat difficult nature!