Korean · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "부탁하다" in Korean?

Q: How do you pronounce 부탁하다 in Korean?

부탁하다 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /pu.tʰa.kʰa.da/. It means “to request / to ask a favor.” boo-ta-ka-da. The ㄱ ending 탁 crashes into the ㅎ of 하 and the two fuse into a single strongly aspirated k -- which is why the romanization shows no h at all.

boo-ta-ka-da. The ㄱ ending 탁 crashes into the ㅎ of 하 and the two fuse into a single strongly aspirated k -- which is why the romanization shows no h at all.

부탁하다 /pu.tʰa.kʰa.da/

butakada

Four flat syllables. The event to flag is aspiration coalescence at the 탁+하 boundary: ㄱ plus ㅎ collapses into ㅋ, so a word spelled with four consonant letters through the middle comes out of the mouth with three sounds.

Listen: 부탁하다

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Sound it out

bu ㅂ at the start of a word is plain: barely voiced and with no puff. It lands closer to a soft p than to the b of 'boo'.

ta ㅌ is the aspirated member of the t-family, so let a clear burst of breath follow the tongue off the ridge.

ka Written as a ㄱ batchim plus ㅎ, pronounced as one aspirated ㅋ. The stop and the h merge outright; you never hear them as two separate events.

da The dictionary-form ending, softly voiced between vowels and left completely unstressed.

Hear it in a sentence

이것 좀 부탁해요.

Igeot jom butakaeyo.

Could you take care of this, please?

Listen: 이것 좀 부탁해요.

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이것 좀 부탁해요 keeps the same fusion alive in the conjugated form, and adds a second change at the front: 이것 ends in a ㅅ realized as an unreleased t, and 좀 begins with ㅈ, so that ㅈ tenses to ㅉ -- i-geot-jjom in real speech.

Where English speakers slip

Beginners pronounce every letter and produce 'bu-tak-ha-da', with an audible k, a gap, and then an h. Korean fuses them: there is exactly one consonant in that position and it is a hard, breathy ㅋ. The other tell is starting with a full English b, when ㅂ word-initially carries no real voicing, so 부 should sound almost like 'poo' to an English ear.