Why would anyone ask you about it though? You didn’t answer the question about your credentials. 그냥 궁금하니까 한국말로 대답해보면 어때?
And you never posted a recording of the languages you supposedly speak 
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내가 굳이 왜 그렇게까지 해야하냐? 걍 날 믿으면 안되나? 내가 거짓말할 이유가 뭐가 있어?
Because it doesn’t matter whether or not you can write Korean in a discussion about how ㅂ is pronounced. You would have a lot more credibility if we know that you speak both Korean and [insert European language here] like a native speaker.
That said, your and my background are irrelevant at this point because more knowledgeable people than you and I have studied this topic and come to the conclusion that initial ㅂ is different than intervocalic ㅂ, and both are different from English b. @Vsotvep has cited plenty of links already, so I don’t feel the need to do further research for you.
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Could it be? Could it actually be… that you don’t have any clue how to speak Korean?
You got me 
I actually have never heard of Korean before this conversation. I just happened to come to the same conclusions as professional linguists by sheer luck!
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Why don’t you answer in Korean then? Why don’t you tell me what your Korean language level is? At this point the chance that you actually know how to speak Korean seems to be pretty much 0
My teacher would say it’s untoward to use it to a stranger in an unknown situation, but my teacher is very proper about speech levels.
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The 반말 is strong in this one, perhaps this is why I choose to stay in English 
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Past time for a mod to shut this down and split it from the thread (I’m not referring to benjito in reaching this conclusion). @Vsotvep @yebellz
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Yeah right 
@Regenwasser, please don’t resort to ad hominem in trying to win your argument. Whether or not any of us can write and/or speak Korean is not relevant to the discussion.
Please keep this discussion pleasant for everyone involved.
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So what is the “usual sound” of this character? That seems quite unclear to me, since the pronunciation varies across languages, and several languages (e.g., English, French) have multiple different ways of pronouncing that character.
In English, it seems that the two most common forms are (informally speaking) the “short i” sound (such as in words like “it”, “is”, “in”, “did”) and the “long i” sound (such as in words like “like”, “side”, “fire”). The letter “i” can also have a “long e” sound (like “fiat”, “taxi”, “visa”), but that seems much less common than the first two forms. I think that in the typical conventions of informally describing pronunciations in English, one would call such a sound as a “long e”. Overall, in a written English discussion, it is quite unclear to say “i sound” without clarification.
However, I think the even bigger issue is lumping the sounds of both syllables of weiqi (under the common Mandarin pronunciation) into the same sound. Even if you mean the “usual sound” of “i” as following the Spanish conventions, one could only say that the second syllable has a (Spanish) “i” sound, while the first syllable has a (Spanish) “e” sound, approximately speaking.
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This really has not been a pleasant experience for me. Maybe I should have stopped the moment I already knew where this was going:
But my personal conviction to always fight for the truth and to fight against misinformation kept me going. I do have to say that I am proud of myself for not backing down. If someone wants to educate themselves on this topic they at least have the chance to get it right by believing what I wrote about it. Of course the chances for that are slim since so many people (that are not actually educated in the matte) have felt the need to chime in. This will be my final post in this thread though.
I’m disappointed that this is your assessment of this whole ordeal. I’ve been very polite right from the very beginning as you can see reading my posts. I’m not the one who made this discussion sour. Where were you when several users (non of whom actually speak Korean btw) tried to ridicule me for speaking the truth and were passive aggressive or straight up aggressive and insulting towards me?
Do you think this made the thread pleasant for me? I hope you guys feel really great about ganging up on someone and lecturing someone in a language he knows better than you. But yeah yeah I get it:
Finally, I would like to point out that I very much do not appreciate you leaving the original (erroneous) comment
On the topic of Baduk. The new romanization of Korean is weird. The old romanization was better when you transliterated it Paduk which is like how it is actually prounounced
in the original thread. Some people might read this and actually believe it without having the chance to read my side.
I have no problem with your initial posts, the warning was for suggesting that @benjito does not speak Korean and putting them on the spot for not switching to writing Korean.
In case you misunderstood my message, there is nothing wrong with having your opinion and making claims here, but you should not argue by putting people’s personal identity on the spot and making it part of the discussion. That is, please argue on the content of the messages, not on the people making the messages (i.e. ad hominem).
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I have not said anything to you about Korean pronunciations, but rather only the Chinese word “weiqi”.
I genuinely was not sure if maybe you were joking or simply misunderstood the pronunciation in Chinese. I think that the phrases “i sounds” without further clarification is very vague, and inappropriate to lump the sounds of both syllables into the same category.
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That said, I have found that frequently people are far less able to spot the irregularities in the languages they speak natively than people who learn the language. As someone who learns Japanese, I have on multiple occasions (admittedly two, but it’s more than once) heard Japanese native speakers complain that you can never know how to pronounce an English word, while it is always clear how to pronounce a Japanese word by reading it (in hiragana / katakana).
Neither of these realised that this isn’t the case, for example, すき is pronounced s-ki while すみ is pronounced sumi, so す can be either “s” or “su” dependent on the word. Another example of a differently pronounced symbol would be the い in げいしゃ or はいしゃ. Also, はな can be 花 or 鼻, both pronounced with different pitch accent, which cannot be inferred from reading the word. To make it worse, pitch accents work in such a way that previous words can affect the accent of the next word, etc.
In reverse, I never realised how to actually pronounce many Dutch sounds until after I started helping my wife learn the language. No amount of “just listen, it sounds like this” can help you explain how to pronounce the Dutch u, but watching a single (English) instruction video on it, made it clear that this is like saying the vowel in the English word “cheek”, but rounding your lips at the same time.
So, in short, not knowing a language can be helpful in pointing out how things are pronounced.
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However, these are diphthongs, going from the vowel in “palm” towards the vowel in “cheek”.
But the first syllable of weiqi is also a diphthong, the same one in “May” as pronounced in many American accents, if I’m not mistaken. But then, this is not a diphthong in a Scottish accent, for instance…
It’s pretty hard talking about sounds without specifying examples from words used in a particular dialect, using IPA symbols, or giving an audio recording.
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In my experience, people can be doing everything technically right, but still sound wrong to me. Some get defensive, but I don’t find IPA to be above my native experience. Intonation may be wrong, rhythm, or space allowed for each sound. I’m not saying they have to speak perfectly, just not try to persuade me they speak perfectly.
I understand its use to codify, study and explain something so extremely complex as the web of human language, but people are allowed to claim they know their own language.
I tend to be sensitive to pronunciation and dialects though (as in, I can detect and distinguish them), so maybe it’s just me. 
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IPA is definitely not sophisticated enough to perfectly describe the pronunciation of words, but it’s a nice way to talk about this stuff without relying on knowledge of specific dialects. I think in this case, it’s able to describe at least part of the difference that @yebellz brought up, namely that wei has an ɪ and qi has an i.
There are also glides like j, but I dont know if that’s appropriate in this case.
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