What's the difference between 잇다 and 있다?

ANSWER: Besides their meanings and spellings, there is also their pronunciations.

잇다 means to join or to connect, and 있다 means to exist, so they have different meanings, but the only difference in their pronunciations is that 잇다 is pronounced with a long vowel sound, and 있다 with a short one. In other words, the 이 in 잇다 is pronounced longer than the 이 in 있다.

Korean-English dictionaries do not usually mark short and long vowel sounds, but many Korean-Korean dictionaries do, which is a good reason to also consult a Korean-Korean dictionary when learning a new word. Korean-Korean dictionaries usually leave a short-vowel sound unmarked but mark a long-vowel sound with a colon after the vowel sound. For example, 있다 is listed as "있다," and 잇다 as "잇:다" in many Korean-Korean dictionaries. That means 있다 is pronounced /읻따/, and 잇다 is pronounced similar to /이읻따/.

But do long-vowel sounds really make that big a difference when speaking Korean? Well, except for the 을 and 에, the only other way to distinguish the following two sentences in spoken Korean is by using the short-vowel sound in the sentence with 있는 and the long-vowel sound in the sentence with 잇는.

• 남과 북에 있는 [인는] 다리
  a bridge between the North and the South
   
• 남과 북을 잇는 [인:는] 다리
  a bridge connecting the North and the South