I wonder if they will sell me a shitty print when I buy whatever comes of this . <| sep |> Yeah unfortunately it ' s impossible to know how an unknown oo should be pronounced . It can be one of two possibilities either the long U sound , or the short U sound . The long U is the most complex vowel in the English language . The long U can be triggered by a terminal e cute , flute , blueThe long U can be triggered by ui suit , fruitThe long U can be triggered by ew chew , stew , flew . The long U can be triggered by oo boot , scoot , poop . But it ' s not a hard and fast rule , because some oo combinations can make the short U sound instead foot , soot , rook . As far as I ' m aware , no other vowel in the English language has this level of irregularity . It ' s just one sound . But there ' s many different ways to spell the sound . Us NETs have to teach these patterns because they are never taught in the Korean curriculum . They just kinda throw all the phonemes at the students over the course of middle schoolgrade 1 middle school , and hope that the students just magically absorb them via rote memorization . For your students , Korean is a little different . In Korean the vowel sounds are fairly consistent with the exception of 에 애 얘 , but the consonant sounds can change dramatically based upon their location within both the syllable and the word . For example , the ㄹ in 백로 is actually pronounced like a ㄴ , which happens whenever a ㄹ follows a voiceless consonant . And after the ㄹ becomes an ㄴ , that triggers the ㄱ in 백로 to be nasalized and pronounced like an ㅇ . In reality , a better match for the sound would be 뱅노 . But that ' s just not how the word is spelled . Native Korean students learn how to figure out these pronunciation patterns in their Korean classes in elementarymiddle school , but they need to be taught how to search for them in English vowels .