Korean · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "늦다" in Korean?

neut-tta. The lip-flat ㅡ, a ㅈ batchim neutralized to an unreleased t, and a tensed ㄸ at the end.

늦다 /nɯt̚.t͈a/

neutda

Two blocks around a silence. Almost everything demanding in this word is invisible in the romanization -- the vowel, the neutralized batchim and the tensed ending are all things the spelling never signals.

Listen: 늦다

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Sound it out

neu Forward n onto ㅡ, with the lips spread and the tongue high and back.

t Written ㅈ, but no affricate survives at the end of a syllable, so it becomes an unreleased [t̚].

da A tensed ㄸ, forced by that closure and unmarked in the romanization.

Hear it in a sentence

오늘 조금 늦었어요.

Oneul jogeum neujeosseoyo.

I was a little late today.

Listen: 오늘 조금 늦었어요.

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

오늘 조금 늦었어요 restores the hidden ㅈ in the past-tense form, where it resyllabifies forward and voices, giving neu-jeo-sseo-yo. The j that does not exist in 늦다 is clearly audible in 늦었어요.

Where English speakers slip

'noot-da' with rounded lips and a soft ending gets both hard parts wrong at once: spread the lips for the ㅡ and compress the throat for the ㄸ. Learners also try to pronounce the written ㅈ in the middle, which produces a cluster Korean does not permit at the end of a syllable.