LingoDrop
Korean · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "개" in Korean?
gae, one beat, rhyming with English 'get' minus the t. The consonant is plain ㄱ, so soft rather than hard.
gae
A counter, so it always trails a number and takes no stress of its own. The rhythm to internalize is number-plus-counter as one unit, and note that a numeral ending in a stop regularly tenses this ㄱ into ㄲ.
Listen: 개
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
사과 두 개 주세요.
Sagwa du gae juseyo.
Two apples, please.
Listen: 사과 두 개 주세요.
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사과 두 개 주세요 keeps 개 plain, because 두 ends in a vowel and there is no stop to trigger tensing -- du-gae. Set that against 다섯 개, where the unreleased t of 다섯 hardens it to da-seot-kkae, and you have the whole rule in a single pair.
Where English speakers slip
The romanization misleads: 'gae' invites an English 'gay', with a long vowel and an off-glide. It is short and flat. Learners also over-harden the initial consonant into a full English g, when plain ㄱ carries much less voicing than that -- and confusingly, 개 with the identical sound also means 'dog', so context rather than pronunciation does the disambiguating.