How to Pronounce '聞く': Japanese Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce 聞く in Japanese?

聞く is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ki̥.kɯ̥/. It means “to listen / hear.” ki-ku, two beats — and in normal speech both vowels devoice, so it can sound like little more than "k'k'."

How do you pronounce "聞く" in Japanese?

ki-ku, two beats — and in normal speech both vowels devoice, so it can sound like little more than "k'k'."

聞く /ki̥.kɯ̥/

kiku

Both units are cut to the same size, with the pitch dropping after the first. This is the most extreme devoicing case among common verbs: both vowels can go voiceless, so a native 聞く sounds startlingly thin. What it never does is get shorter — the two beats are still measured out even when there's almost nothing to hear.

Listen: 聞く

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Sound it out

ki A light k with a palatal colouring before the i. Because this vowel sits between a voiceless k and another voiceless k, it is a prime devoicing candidate and often survives only as a whisper.

ku Another unaspirated k into the unrounded u, and at the end of the word this vowel devoices too. The result is a word made almost entirely of breath — but still two full beats long.

Hear it in a sentence

毎日ラジオを聞きます。

Mainichi rajio o kikimasu.

I listen to the radio every day.

Listen: 毎日ラジオを聞きます。

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

毎日ラジオを聞きます gives the verb as 聞きます, where the first i devoices between the two k's while the ki that follows keeps more voicing before the m. ラジオ earlier in the sentence is three morae (ra-ji-o) with a tap and a soft palatal j — a loanword that Japanese renders longer and lighter than English "radio."

Where English speakers slip

What an English mouth delivers is "KEE-koo": two fully voiced, rounded, stressed-then-unstressed syllables. That's about as far from the target as it gets. Shorten both vowels drastically, unround the lips, soften both k's so no air puffs out, and let the vowels go voiceless. If your 聞く sounds substantial, it's wrong — it should sound almost like a whisper with timing.