Korean · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "지내다" in Korean?

Q: How do you pronounce 지내다 in Korean?

지내다 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /tɕi.nɛ.da/. It means “to get along / to spend time.” ji-nae-da, three beats. The middle vowel is ㅐ, a flat front vowel like the a in 'cat', not the 'ay' the romanization suggests.

ji-nae-da, three beats. The middle vowel is ㅐ, a flat front vowel like the a in 'cat', not the 'ay' the romanization suggests.

지내다 /tɕi.nɛ.da/

jinaeda

Three blocks of identical length. The verb is mostly heard inside the greeting 잘 지내세요 or the question 어떻게 지내요, so its real prosodic home is a phrase whose pitch rises at the end -- the word itself never carries a bump.

Listen: 지내다

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

ji Plain ㅈ, only lightly voiced at the front of a word, running onto a tight 'ee'.

nae Forward n plus ㅐ. Keep it short and low -- the romanized 'ae' is one vowel, not a diphthong.

da The citation marker: voiced by its neighbours, and gone as soon as the verb takes a real ending.

Hear it in a sentence

요즘 어떻게 지내요?

Yojeum eotteoke jinaeyo?

How have you been lately?

Listen: 요즘 어떻게 지내요?

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

요즘 어떻게 지내요? sets 지내요 after 어떻게, which packs a tensed ㄸ and an aspirated ㅋ into three syllables. The contrast is instructive: the question word is full of extreme consonants and the verb that follows has none at all.

Where English speakers slip

The 'ae' invites an English long a, giving 'ji-NAY-da' with both a diphthong and a stress bump, and neither is Korean -- the vowel is short and flat, and all three syllables are level. Some learners also aspirate the opening ㅈ, which pushes the word toward 치내다 and away from anything meaningful.