Korean · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "틀리다" in Korean?

Q: How do you pronounce 틀리다 in Korean?

틀리다 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /tʰɯl.li.da/. It means “to be wrong / to be mistaken (verb).” teul-li-da. The doubled ㄹ is a genuinely long l, so hold it, and the first vowel is the lip-flat ㅡ under an aspirated ㅌ.

teul-li-da. The doubled ㄹ is a genuinely long l, so hold it, and the first vowel is the lip-flat ㅡ under an aspirated ㅌ.

틀리다 /tʰɯl.li.da/

teullida

Timing rather than emphasis is the issue: that geminate l genuinely takes about twice as long as a single one, and it is one of the few places where Korean uses consonant length to carry information.

Listen: 틀리다

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Sound it out

teu Aspirated ㅌ with a real puff, over ㅡ with the lips spread. Two difficult things stacked into one syllable.

lli A long, held l. The ㄹ closing the first block and the ㄹ opening this one merge into a single sustained lateral, not two taps.

da Softly voiced, unaccented, and gone the moment the verb conjugates.

Hear it in a sentence

전화번호가 틀렸어요.

Jeonhwabeonhoga teullyeosseoyo.

The phone number is wrong.

Listen: 전화번호가 틀렸어요.

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전화번호가 틀렸어요 keeps the long l in the past-tense form and adds a resyllabification at the end, teul-lyeo-sseo-yo. The subject 전화번호가 lenites both of its ㅎ sounds, so the whole sentence runs soft until that l arrives.

Where English speakers slip

English speakers produce a single quick l and the word sounds truncated -- hold it. The aspiration is the other casualty, since a soft ㄷ gives 들리다, a real verb meaning 'to be heard', so under-aspirating here does not merely sound wrong, it says something else.