Korean · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "다" in Korean?

da, one open beat. Plain ㄷ with no breath behind it, and a wide 'ah' vowel.

다 /ta/

da

A single unaccented beat. As an adverb meaning 'all' it sits directly before a verb and shares that verb's phrase contour; unlike English 'all', it does not attract emphasis, and stressing it makes a plain statement sound insistent.

Listen: 다

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Sound it out

d ㄷ at the start of a word carries very little voicing, which is why English ears usually hear a t here rather than a d.

a Open, unrounded ㅏ held short. No lengthening, even when the word is doing emphatic work.

Hear it in a sentence

다 했어요.

Da haesseoyo.

I did everything.

Listen: 다 했어요.

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다 했어요 puts 다 in front of 했어요, and the ㅆ of 했 resyllabifies into 어 to give hae-sseo-yo with a full double s. The short adverb and the longer verb form a single two-word phrase spoken without any pause between them.

Where English speakers slip

The temptation is to lengthen the vowel for emphasis -- 'daaa haesseoyo' -- which does not work in Korean, where duration is not the emphasis device it is in English. Keep it clipped. Aspirating the consonant into 타 is the other slip, and that is an entirely different word meaning 'to ride'.