Korean · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "닫다" in Korean?

Q: How do you pronounce 닫다 in Korean?

닫다 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /tat̚.t͈a/. It means “to close.” dat-tta. Three ㄷ letters on the page and not one of them is a plain English d: a light initial stop, a silent closure, and a tensed ㄸ.

dat-tta. Three ㄷ letters on the page and not one of them is a plain English d: a light initial stop, a silent closure, and a tensed ㄸ.

닫다 /tat̚.t͈a/

datda

Two beats around a held closure. The word is a useful demonstration that a single Korean letter has at least three distinct realizations depending on where it sits -- and all three of them appear here inside four sounds.

Listen: 닫다

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

Sound it out

da Plain ㄷ word-initially: little voicing, no aspiration, so it sits between English d and t.

t The ㄷ batchim, unreleased. The tongue reaches the ridge and stops, and the silence itself carries the information.

da Tensed ㄸ, forced by the stop before it. Locked throat, no breath, sharp release.

Hear it in a sentence

창문을 닫아 주세요.

Changmuneul dada juseyo.

Please close the window.

Listen: 창문을 닫아 주세요.

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

창문을 닫아 주세요 conjugates to 닫아, where the batchim resyllabifies forward and voices into a genuine d: da-da. The consonant that was silent in 닫다 becomes the softest sound in 닫아, which is about as complete a reversal as Korean phonology offers.

Where English speakers slip

The middle t gets released with an English burst and the final one gets softened -- the standard double error, and neither half is right. Hold that closure genuinely silent, because an audible release turns the first syllable into something that sounds like a separate word.