Most Common Korean Words Pronounced Wrong Part. 1

Pronouncing Korean can be difficult given the many exceptions to basic pronunciation rules. In many cases, words seemingly simple have a different pronunciation from their 한글 spelling. Below are listed the most common words that have a different pronunciation from their spelling. These common words were selected among the first 1000 words from the book A Frequency Dictionary of Korean. This list will be updated with relevant pronunciation guides on KoniKorean when available.

Notes about the table:

• Rank corresponds to the rank in A Frequency Dictionary of Korean, from most common in the Korean language to least common.
• Pronunciation was extracted from the Naver Dictionary of Korean.
• Words with especially tricky pronunciation are in yellow rows.
• Meaning is presented for quick reference; many words have different meanings depending on context.
• The colon : indicates that the preceding syllable is a long one.

Pronunciation Tips

• When in doubt, use the Naver Korean Dictionary to confirm the pronunciation of a word. Especially useful for words of Chinese origins, such as 778. 발전 pronounced [발쩐] instead of [발전].

Note: something many Koreans do not realize but do naturally is the presence of short and long vowels. While these have disappeared from modern Hangul, they are still used to subtly differentiate between words. For example, a lot of beginner books state than 말 (speech) and 말 (horse) are pronounced the same and that context helps differentiate the two words; however, 말 (speech) has actually a long "a" vowel sound whereas 말 (horse) has a short "a" sound. In the dictionary, syllables with long vowels are followed by a colon sign, for example "말 [말:]" for speech and "말" for horse (pronunciation in the Naver dictionary is displayed only for words that have a pronunciation different from their spelling).