Pronunciation of syllable 와

Question

In an app I use to learn keorean, I noticed that in the sentence "사과와 바나나", the word '사과' is pronounced like '사가'(saga in the place of sagwa).

Another instance where I noticed this was in the sentence "저는 영화관에 없습니다". Here the word '영화관' was pronounced like '영화간'.( Yeonhwagan instead of yeonghwagwan).

Can someone please elaborate on this variation in pronunciation? Is it the case if '와' is followed by a vowel?

I'm not sure with the romanisations and I apologise if they are incorrect.

Answer 1

That pronunciation is incorrect, but also commonly used in practice since 1) it still sounds similar and it is easier to pronounce in that way, and 2) in most cases, from the context, we can guess what the original word is. However, you should avoid pronouncing in that way if you are not a fluent Korean speaker.

Some other examples are:

과자 -> 가자 or 까자

생활 -> 생할

Based on my personal experience, this happens most often with 과, and significantly less with other instances of ㅘ.