Vowel lengthening matters in Korean technically but is more often context-sensitive than length sensitive like it regularly is in Japanese for reasons I don’t k

Vowel lengthening matters in Korean technically but is more often context-sensitive than length sensitive like it regularly is in Japanese for reasons I don’t know. 눈 can mean snow or eye in Korean depending upon how long you extend the vowel as recently as 1970, for example, but many Koreans (especially younger Koreans) have less sensitivity and don’t use it. When I learned Japanese there were more words where it was easier to confuse them and thus require a distinction, probably preserving length. Overall Korean historically has had a tendency toward reducing tones and sounds (it used to have f and z sounds like in Chinese, for example). It continues to eliminate vowels where a lot of Koreans are not pronouncing the sound 최 fully and eliminating lip rounding to make it simply 체.