LingoDrop
Korean · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "사다" in Korean?
sa-da, two open beats. A light, slightly breathy s and a soft voiced d, over two matching 'ah' vowels.
sada
A flat, unaccented two-beat shape. The one thing worth watching is the s, because Korean's plain ㅅ is phonetically weaker than the English one and learners routinely overshoot it, which makes the word sound harder-edged than it should.
Listen: 사다
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
매일 빵을 사요.
Maeil ppangeul sayo.
I buy bread every day.
Listen: 매일 빵을 사요.
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매일 빵을 사요 opens with 매일 and then 빵을, whose tensed ㅃ and final ㅇ do all the phonological work: the ng resyllabifies into the particle, giving ppang-eul with the nasal carried across. The verb 사요 then arrives as two soft, unremarkable beats.
Where English speakers slip
Hitting the s too hard is the subtle error here, and it is worth correcting because the same overshoot affects every ㅅ you say. Aim for less friction than English uses. The more obvious slip is aspirating the ㄷ into 'sa-ta', which produces 사타 and stops being a word anyone recognizes.