SPEAKING · PRONUNCIATION LAB
Pronunciation that gets through
Where most languages have one or two p-like sounds, Korean has three. 불, 뿔 and 풀 are fire, horn and grass. Say one, and we tell you which word came out — and what to change if it was the wrong one.
We only score you where a wrong sound makes a different real word. That is the one place a speech recogniser can honestly tell what you did, and it happens to be the hardest part of Korean. Everywhere else we play the sound and let you compare, rather than inventing a score.
fire
This browser cannot listen
Chrome and Safari can hear you; Firefox cannot. We will not pretend to score you without it — play the words instead and compare them against yourself.
Plain · tense · aspirated
Three consonants where most languages have one or two. 불, 뿔 and 풀 are three different words.
Hold a sheet of paper in front of your mouth. Aspirated (ㅍ) blows it hard. Plain (ㅂ) moves it a little. Tense (ㅃ) barely moves it at all — the throat squeezes instead, and the sound starts the instant the lips open.
What we deliberately do not score
Other courses drill these. We leave them out on purpose, and it is only fair to say why — so that you can judge for yourself when you meet them elsewhere.
- ㅐ · ㅔ (개 · 게)We do not drill ㅐ against ㅔFor most Seoul speakers under about forty these have merged into one vowel. Native speakers tell 개 from 게 by context, not by sound, and they spell them wrong in text messages for the same reason. A machine scoring this is flipping a coin, and a drill that trains you to hear a difference that is no longer there costs you time you could spend on the three-way consonant split.
- ㅚ · ㅙ · ㅞ (외 · 왜 · 웨)We do not drill ㅚ, ㅙ and ㅞ apartSame story, further along. These three are pronounced identically by nearly everyone now. Learn them as spellings to memorise, not as sounds to produce.
- 낫 · 낮 · 낯 · 밭 → all [ㄷ]Final ㅅ, ㅈ, ㅊ and ㅌ are not a pronunciation problemBefore a pause or a consonant these all close as the same held ㄷ, so 낫, 낮 and 낯 really are homophones there — there is no way to say them wrong, and nothing in your mouth needs fixing. Two things to keep straight, though. Before a vowel the original consonant comes back (낫이 [나시], 낯이 [나치]), so the spelling still matters. And final ㅎ is not in this list: it never surfaces as a held ㄷ at all — it drops before a vowel (놓아 [노아]) and turns a following ㄷ into ㅌ (놓다 [노타]). Both of those belong to the sound-change lab, not here.