Pagué: how to pronounce?

In the lesson "9.2 Fishing Adventure" we can hear the sentence like this:
Pagué ciento veinte dólares por una caña más o menos buena.

The lector pronounces the word "Pagué" like "pallé". Is it a mistake or is it correct in some Spanish speaking countries? 

I went back and listened to the phrase in 9.2 and I'm hearing "pagué" as you would expect it to be pronounced. I then tried listening to it on Google and it was pronounced something like "pallé". Weird. Either the automatic pronunciation on Google is wrong or maybe, as you say, there are some regional variants.
 

Hola a todos,

I too listened to the pronunciation  several times, and it sounds like "pagué" to me as well. In the additional vocabulary section  regarding the purchase of  a car, it also sounds like  "pagué". I imagine there are many variations regarding pronunciation , the "shama" in Argentina for "llama" etc. I'm a bit skeptical about Google and some other sites but SpanishDict seems to have good info as well as pronunciation although at times that can be questionable too.

Saludos,

Ricardo

Hi there!

It's hard perhaps trying to find the most accurate phonetic pronunciation to the word in Spanish; if the difficult part is the "gu" part from pagué, I would use the same pronunciation of "get" →"ge" and emphasize the accent on the "e".

Cheers!
 

Intuitively, I would pronounce it with a hard "g"

A hard "g" it is. Aurora, so nice to see you back on the forum!!! Dan and I had noticed your absence - you have been missed. :-)

 

The verb pagar uses a hard 'g' when conjugated in the indicative.  When you do other conjugations like the preterite, the normal conjugation for pagar would be pagé.  However, the pronunciation of the g would change to an 'h'.  Spanish does not like to have things like that happen so we change the spelling to keep the hard 'g', hence pagué.  A lot of the irregular verbs seem to follow this approach.

I am back, maybe not as much as I did before. I did miss the regulars in the forum. Tonight, George and I are flying to Venice, Italy to catch a Mediterranean Cruise covering Italy, Turkey, Greece, France. Will end up in Barcelona, Spain and maybe spend 5 days there and try to go to the Basque country. I would like to visit the Church of "Our Lady of Pillar". So hopefully in three weeks, we'll be back safely. I also stopped the Spanish class in the local senior center when the instructor decided to quit to go to Alaska.