LingoDrop
Korean · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "내일" in Korean?
nae-il. The first vowel is the short flat ㅐ and the second a tight 'ee', with no consonant between them.
naeil
Neither block is stronger than the other. The technical feature is the vowel-to-vowel join in the middle: no consonant separates them, so the tongue simply rises from ㅐ to ㅣ while the voice keeps running through the gap.
Listen: 내일
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
내일 만나요.
Naeil mannayo.
See you tomorrow.
Listen: 내일 만나요.
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
내일 만나요 pairs it with 만나요 and its held double n, so a word built entirely on vowels is followed immediately by the longest nasal in the language. The contrast in texture is stark and useful to hear.
Where English speakers slip
Reading 'ae' as an English long a gives 'nay-eel', which adds a glide and effectively inserts a y between the two vowels, when ㅐ is short and flat. The other habit is a glottal stop at the join, which English speakers add automatically and which chops the word in half.