Similar, but not quite the same if you learned Korean more than 20 years ago. Evidently younger Koreans do not distinguish much between the two sounds.[1]

[1] http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2619/how-to-d...

Even if these letters represented the exact same sound, Hangul would still be an alphabetic system, wouldn't it? There are plenty of combinations of glyphs which map to the same sounds in English, e.g. "ay" in "play" and "eigh" in "sleigh" or "weigh". (Although if you're making a point about only the second part of the quote — "each symbol represents separate phoneme" — then I apologize.)

I think the author was trying to distinguish between Hangul and, say, written Chinese or Japanese Kanji which are logographic. I've known lots of people in the US who assume the Korean written language functions similarly because "all Asian languages are like that".

Yes, my question was actually aimed at the second part of the sentence which seemed to suggest that there was a bijection between sounds and symbols.

Either way, I can see how what you're saying makes sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#/media/File:Hangeul_let... suggests that ㅔ represents 'e' and 'ㅐ' represents 'ae'. The differences between these sounds may be difficult for someone who isn't accustom to the sounds to distinguish.

Compare the Japanese with the difficulty of 'l' vs 'r'. And an obligatory Babylon 5 scene with Zathras - https://youtu.be/1j-76eLz1hc?t=1m40s

> Compare the Japanese with the difficulty of 'l' vs 'r'.

This comparison is not apt. Japanese has neither l nor r; the sound commonly transliterated as "r" is a different sound.

It is a sound that lies between the two liquids in English. The words "flesh" and "fresh" sound the same t0 the ear that doesn't hear them.

By way of http://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/112384/do-all-native-...

> However, even before their first birthdays, babies begin to lose the ability to hear the distinctions among phonemes in languages other than their own.

From http://www.encyclopedia.com/media/encyclopedias-almanacs-tra...

If you ask any young person in Seoul, their pronounciation is identical.

Even native speakers can't always tell a difference anymore :).

애 and 에 are supposed to be pronounced differently. However, the evolution of the language made the 애 phoneme sound more like 에