Korean · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "뜨겁다" in Korean?

Q: How do you pronounce 뜨겁다 in Korean?

뜨겁다 is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /t͈ɯ.gʌp̚.t͈a/. It means “to be hot (to the touch).” tteu-geop-tta. It opens on the hardest possible combination -- a tensed ㄸ over the lip-flat ㅡ -- and closes on another tensed stop.

tteu-geop-tta. It opens on the hardest possible combination -- a tensed ㄸ over the lip-flat ㅡ -- and closes on another tensed stop.

뜨겁다 /t͈ɯ.gʌp̚.t͈a/

tteugeopda

Three blocks and one silent closure. The word is bookended by tensed consonants with a soft voiced one in the middle, so it has a hard-soft-hard shape that has nothing to do with loudness.

Listen: 뜨겁다

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

Sound it out

tteu Tensed ㄸ with the throat locked, then ㅡ with the lips spread. Tension and lip-spreading demanded at the same instant.

geop ㄱ voiced between the vowel before and the vowel here, the unrounded ㅓ, and an unreleased ㅂ.

da Tensed ㄸ again, forced by that closure.

Hear it in a sentence

커피가 아직 뜨거워요.

Keopiga ajik tteugeowoyo.

The coffee is still hot.

Listen: 커피가 아직 뜨거워요.

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

커피가 아직 뜨거워요 uses the ㅂ-irregular form, where the stop has become a w and the adjective runs tteu-geo-wo-yo. Only the opening tensed ㄸ survives from the dictionary form's two hard consonants.

Where English speakers slip

Softening the ㄸ into an English d gives 드겁다, which is nothing at all -- lock the throat. Then the ㅡ has to stay unrounded even though it follows a stop release, and pairing those two demands inside one syllable is what makes this word's first beat the hardest thing in it.