LingoDrop
Korean · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "보다" in Korean?
bo-da, a rounded beat then an open one. Plain ㅂ at the front, so barely voiced, and a soft d in the middle.
boda
No accent falls on either half. Beyond the verb itself, 보다 also works as the comparative particle meaning 'than', and in that role it attaches to a noun and loses any independent prominence -- same shape, different rhythmic behaviour.
Listen: 보다
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
텔레비전을 봐요.
Tellebijeoneul bwayo.
I watch television.
Listen: 텔레비전을 봐요.
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텔레비전을 봐요 contracts the stem to 봐요, compressing 보 and 아 into a single w-glide syllable. The long loanword in front resyllabifies at the particle, giving tel-le-bi-jeo-neul, so the sentence moves from a four-beat noun into a two-beat verb without a pause anywhere.
Where English speakers slip
The vowel is the first casualty: English speakers give ㅗ the diphthong of 'boat', gliding off toward 'oo', where Korean holds it steady. The second is treating the initial ㅂ as a full English b -- there is little voicing at the start of a word, and overdoing it makes the consonant heavier than any Korean speaker would produce.