LingoDrop
Korean · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "에" in Korean?
A single bare vowel, 'eh' as in 'bet' -- no consonant, no glide, and no stress. It fuses onto whatever noun comes before it.
e
One unstressed beat that always attaches rightward onto a noun and is never spoken in isolation. Its main effect on timing is that a consonant-final noun will hand its batchim across to fill this otherwise empty onset.
Listen: 에
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
학교에 가요.
Hakgyoe gayo.
I go to school.
Listen: 학교에 가요.
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학교에 가요 avoids that, since 학교 ends in a vowel and nothing shifts -- you simply get hak-gyo-e. What does happen is inside 학교 itself, where the ㄱ of 교 tenses after the unreleased k of 학, making the word hak-kkyo rather than hak-gyo.
Where English speakers slip
Turning 에 into the English diphthong 'ay' is the usual slip and makes the particle stick out audibly. Keep the tongue still through it. Learners also confuse it with 에서: 에 marks a destination or a static location, 에서 marks where an action takes place, and the pronunciation difference is simply whether that second syllable is present.