Korean · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "배우다" in Korean?

Q: How do you pronounce 배우다 in Korean?

배우다 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /pɛ.u.da/. It means “to learn.” bae-u-da. Three syllables, and the middle one is a bare rounded vowel arriving directly after a front one with nothing in between.

bae-u-da. Three syllables, and the middle one is a bare rounded vowel arriving directly after a front one with nothing in between.

배우다 /pɛ.u.da/

baeuda

No accent anywhere in the three syllables. The interesting timing sits at the vowel-to-vowel join, where English would insert a glottal stop and Korean simply keeps the voice running -- so the word should sound continuous rather than segmented.

Listen: 배우다

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Sound it out

bae Plain ㅂ, quiet, over ㅐ -- the low front vowel of 'cat', short and without any glide.

u A bare rounded ㅜ. Two vowels meet here, so the lips must travel from spread to rounded with no consonant to help them.

da Soft, voiced and weightless -- a closing syllable rather than a sound worth working on.

Hear it in a sentence

저는 한국어를 배워요.

Jeoneun Hangugeoreul baewoyo.

I'm learning Korean.

Listen: 저는 한국어를 배워요.

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

저는 한국어를 배워요 contracts the verb to 배워, folding the ㅜ into a w-glide, so a three-beat dictionary form becomes a two-beat conjugated one. Ahead of it, 한국어를 resyllabifies its ㄱ into the following vowel, giving han-gu-geo-reul.

Where English speakers slip

The 'ae' gets read as an English long a, giving 'bay-oo-da' and adding a glide the vowel does not have. Keep it short and flat. Then there is the join itself: putting a small catch between 배 and 우 is instinctive for English speakers and audibly breaks the word in half.