IPA reference · consonant
k — voiceless velar plosive
The back of the tongue seals against the soft palate and releases without voicing.
Also called: voiceless velar stop, k sound
How to make the voiceless velar plosive
Raise the tongue body to the soft palate, block the air completely, release. Aspiration again varies by language.
English reference points: cat, sky. If you speak English natively you already produce this sound — the work is recognising it and placing it where the target language wants it.
Languages that use it
Sounds it gets confused with
Most pronunciation errors are not random — they are a substitution of the nearest sound the speaker already owns. These are the usual substitutions for k, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Arabic ق is made further back; English speakers substitute /k/.
German, Dutch, Greek and Russian all have a velar fricative that learners flatten to /k/.
What this means for learners
Korean contrasts three /k/-type sounds — plain, aspirated and tense — where English has one.
Teaching this sound
Describing a sound in words gets a student roughly half the way there. The other half is hearing it produced correctly, immediately after producing it incorrectly, with both versions available to replay. That is the argument for recording during the lesson rather than after it: the student leaves with your model of k attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol k make?
k is the voiceless velar plosive. The back of the tongue seals against the soft palate and releases without voicing. In English you can hear it in: cat, sky.
How do you pronounce k?
Raise the tongue body to the soft palate, block the air completely, release. Aspiration again varies by language.
Which languages have the voiceless velar plosive?
Among the languages covered here: Greek (καλά, “well”); Korean (가다, “to go”).
What is the difference between k and q?
Arabic ق is made further back; English speakers substitute /k/.