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Korean · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "지금" in Korean?
ji-geum. The ㅈ is plain and lightly voiced, the ㄱ voices fully between vowels, and the second vowel is the lip-flat ㅡ.
jigeum
Two blocks, unstressed, even though the word means 'now'. English gives temporal adverbs contrastive stress freely; Korean handles that with word order and particles instead, so 지금 stays level.
Listen: 지금
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
지금 가야 해요.
Jigeum gaya haeyo.
I have to go now.
Listen: 지금 가야 해요.
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지금 가야 해요 puts 지금 in front of an obligation construction, and 가야 해요 runs vowel to vowel across its own boundary with the ㅎ weakening between voiced sounds. The whole sentence has just one closure in it, the ㅁ of 금.
Where English speakers slip
The ㅡ rounds into 'goom' for most learners, which is the recurring error with this vowel and worth checking in a mirror. The other slip is the ㄱ: hardening it into a k breaks the pattern that plain stops voice between vowels, and it makes the word sound spelled rather than spoken.