LingoDrop
Korean · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "가다" in Korean?
ga-da, two open beats. Plain ㄱ at the front with almost no voicing, and a soft, voiced d in the middle.
gada
Level delivery across both syllables. The dictionary form is stable, but the conjugated 가요 contracts the stem vowel with the ending rather than adding a syllable, so learning to hear 가다 and 가요 as two beats each -- not two versus three -- is the practical point.
Listen: 가다
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
우리 공원에 가요.
Uri gongwone gayo.
Let's go to the park.
Listen: 우리 공원에 가요.
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우리 공원에 가요 puts the destination before the verb, and 공원에 links its ㄴ into the particle to give gong-wo-ne. The verb then arrives as a simple two-beat 가요 with nothing to assimilate, making this one of the few short sentences in the language with almost no consonant changes in it.
Where English speakers slip
The hard English G is the recurring error: 가 should be soft enough that some learners initially hear it as 'ka'. Do not correct that by adding a puff of air, though, because aspiration lands you on 카. And keep both vowels equally open, since letting the second reduce to a schwa gives 'GAH-duh' and stamps an English rhythm onto the word.