Korean · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "작다" in Korean?

Q: How do you pronounce 작다 in Korean?

작다 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /tɕak̚.t͈a/. It means “to be small.” jak-tta. A soft unaspirated ㅈ at the front, an unreleased ㄱ closure in the middle, and a tensed ㄸ at the end.

jak-tta. A soft unaspirated ㅈ at the front, an unreleased ㄱ closure in the middle, and a tensed ㄸ at the end.

작다 /tɕak̚.t͈a/

jakda

A pair of blocks with a silence between them. The architecture matches 먹다 and 읽다 -- plain onset, stop batchim, tensed ending -- and internalizing that shape once makes a large family of verbs and adjectives predictable at a glance.

Listen: 작다

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Sound it out

ja Plain ㅈ: gentle, no puff at all, sitting over a wide open 'ah'.

k The ㄱ batchim, unreleased. The tongue reaches the velum and stops, with no burst before the next syllable.

da Tensed ㄸ, produced automatically because a stop precedes it.

Hear it in a sentence

그 강아지는 아주 작아요.

Geu gangajineun aju jagayo.

That puppy is very small.

Listen: 그 강아지는 아주 작아요.

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그 강아지는 아주 작아요 conjugates to 작아요, and the trapped ㄱ resyllabifies forward and voices into a genuine g: ja-ga-yo. The silent consonant of the dictionary form becomes the softest sound in the conjugated one.

Where English speakers slip

The opening consonant gets aspirated into 착다 by learners who have been working on their ㅊ and start applying breath everywhere. Plain ㅈ needs none. The other error is releasing the middle k, which adds a burst Korean does not have and makes the word sound like two words spliced together.