Is there really a difference?
I'm learning how to conjugate sentences and I decided to make my own:

오늘 저는 한국어를 공부었어요.

When I translated the sentence it meant what i thought it did, but when learning to conjugate sentences I also learned that sometimes vowels will merge with each other so I wrote it as 공붰어instead of 공부었어. But when I translated it, it came out as 'Today I speak korean' instead of 'Today I studied korean'. Is that just the translator or is there really a difference?

Question

Is there really a difference?
I'm learning how to conjugate sentences and I decided to make my own:

오늘 저는 한국어를 공부었어요.

When I translated the sentence it meant what i thought it did, but when learning to conjugate sentences I also learned that sometimes vowels will merge with each other so I wrote it as 공붰어instead of 공부었어. But when I translated it, it came out as 'Today I speak korean' instead of 'Today I studied korean'. Is that just the translator or is there really a difference?

Answer

I don't know how they explain how Korean works at all. But I could correct what you've done wrong in the sentence. If you want to say, I studied Korean today, you could say 난 오늘 한국어를 공부했어요. If you want to say, I study Korean everyday, you could say 난 매일 한국어를 공부해요. As you can see, both come from the basic form of 공부하다. That means, If you want to use 공부 as a verb, You have to combine 공부 and 하, 해 or so first and then, 었, 웠 or so can follow it. I hope this comes across well.

Answer

Translators tend to come up with "random" results, when you mistype or give incorrect information; so even though a translation appear, it won't necessarily mean that it actually means that.