Korean · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "태어나다" in Korean?

Q: How do you pronounce 태어나다 in Korean?

태어나다 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /tʰɛ.ʌ.na.da/. It means “to be born.” tae-eo-na-da. An aspirated ㅌ at the front, and then two different vowels meeting head-on with no consonant to separate them.

tae-eo-na-da. An aspirated ㅌ at the front, and then two different vowels meeting head-on with no consonant to separate them.

태어나다 /tʰɛ.ʌ.na.da/

taeeonada

Four blocks delivered at the same speed. The hardest stretch is the first two, where ㅐ runs straight into ㅓ: two unrounded vowels in a row, differing only in tongue height and backness, with nothing between them to mark the boundary.

Listen: 태어나다

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Sound it out

tae ㅌ with a real puff of air, onto the flat ㅐ. The romanized 'ae' stands for one short vowel, not a diphthong.

eo The unrounded ㅓ standing alone, immediately after ㅐ. The tongue moves back and down while the voice keeps running.

na n made near the teeth, onto an open ㅏ.

da Voiced and unstressed, closing a word whose difficulty was all in the vowels.

Hear it in a sentence

저는 서울에서 태어났어요.

Jeoneun Seoureseo taeeonasseoyo.

I was born in Seoul.

Listen: 저는 서울에서 태어났어요.

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

저는 서울에서 태어났어요 puts the verb in the past, and 태어났어요 resyllabifies its ㅆ forward to give na-sseo-yo. In front, 서울에서 sends its ㄹ into the particle as a tap, so the sentence is a chain of smooth links with one strongly tensed s near the end.

Where English speakers slip

The two adjacent vowels are the main problem: English speakers either merge them into one long sound or insert a glottal stop, and Korean does neither. Keep both distinct and keep the voice continuous. Under-aspirating the opening ㅌ is the second issue, since a soft version gives 대어나다 and loses the word entirely.