How to Pronounce '안녕하세요': Korean Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce 안녕하세요 in Korean?

안녕하세요 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /an.njʌŋ.ɦa.se.jo/. It means “hello / hi.” Five syllables, ahn-nyeong-ha-se-yo, run together as one smooth greeting. The doubled 'nn' across the middle is real, and 'nyeong' rhymes with 'young', not 'yong'.

How do you pronounce "안녕하세요" in Korean?

Five syllables, ahn-nyeong-ha-se-yo, run together as one smooth greeting. The doubled 'nn' across the middle is real, and 'nyeong' rhymes with 'young', not 'yong'.

안녕하세요 /an.njʌŋ.ɦa.se.jo/

annyeonghaseyo

Five evenly weighted syllables, roughly equal in length -- resist the English instinct to hammer one of them. The only place that behaves specially is the 안+녕 seam, where the batchim ㄴ and the following ㄴ hold as one long n, giving the word a small extra beat right there.

Listen: 안녕하세요

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Sound it out

an Open 'ah' plus a clean tongue-tip n. Korean's n is made slightly further forward than English, almost against the teeth, and it is never swallowed the way English swallows it in 'can go'.

nyeong One syllable, not two. The y-glide runs straight into the 'uh' vowel of 'up', and the ending is the ng of 'sung' with no hard g released after it.

ha A soft breath of h sitting between two voiced sounds, so Korean lets it thin out until it is barely a puff. Do not punch it like the h in 'ha!'.

se S plus the vowel of 'set'. Keep the s plain: it sits between vowels, but Korean will not let it buzz into a z.

yo Rounded 'yo' as in 'yoke', cut short with no glide off toward 'oo'. This is the polite ending that closes most sentences in this register.

Hear it in a sentence

안녕하세요, 잘 지내세요?

Annyeonghaseyo, jal jinaeseyo?

Hello, how are you?

Listen: 안녕하세요, 잘 지내세요?

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In 안녕하세요, 잘 지내세요? the greeting is followed by 잘 지내세요, where 잘 ends in ㄹ and 지 opens with ㅈ. Keep that ㄹ light and tongue-tip, and let the phrase rise gently at the end, since the question is carried entirely by intonation rather than by a question word.

Where English speakers slip

The commonest slip is chopping this into five separate stressed blocks -- ahn-YOHNG-HA-SAY-YO -- which sounds shouted. Second, the vowel in 녕 gets replaced with the 'aw' of 'song', producing 'nyong'; ㅕ is the unrounded 'uh' of 'cup', lips relaxed and flat. Finally, do not release a hard g at the end of 녕, because ㅇ there is pure nasal resonance and nothing more.