Korean pronunciation converter

Hangul spells the parts of a word, not the sound of the whole. 국 and 물 are each pronounced as written on their own, but when they meet, the ㄱ at the end of 국 runs into the ㅁ of 물 and turns into ㅇ: 국물 is said [궁물]. Korean dictionaries print this spoken form in square brackets, and that is the form this converter gives you.

The changes are not slang or fast speech. They are part of standard pronunciation (표준 발음법), they happen in careful speech too, and saying the spelling instead — [국물], [같이] — is one of the clearest signs of a learner who learned from text. The guide to Korean sound-change rules explains each rule in more depth.

Each change in the result is labelled with the rule that caused it. These are the ones that follow from the spelling alone, at every syllable boundary inside a word:

Some sound changes depend on what a word means or how it is built, not on its letters. An ㄴ is added in compounds like 꽃잎 [꼰닙] and 한여름 [한녀름]; Sino-Korean words with ㄹ before ㄷ, ㅅ or ㅈ tense the second sound (갈등 [갈뜽]); verb stems ending in ㄴ or ㅁ tense the ending (신고 [신꼬] as a verb, 'wear and'). The converter adds the ㄴ only for a short list of common compounds (꽃잎 and 한여름 among them) and does not guess the rest, so check such words in a dictionary.

Words are converted one at a time, so it does not link sounds across spaces either. In real speech, short phrases run together; listening to the audio is the best guide there.

Under the result, Record myself opens a recorder on the same text. You read the normal written Korean, saying it the way the brackets show, and you get a 0–100 score for every word and every sound, with the weakest one named. The same recorder takes any text on the Korean pronunciation practice page, and the five-word Korean accent test gives a quick overall read.