Let's take a look at four of the sounds we just learned:

and .

Make each of these sounds now. Give it a try!

Now, what if we made them stronger, aspirating (and almost spitting) as we spoke them? What sound would we make then?

For , a more aspirated sound forcing out more air would make sound. How about ? It would result in a sound. Try it now.

And ? "" sound, like a or . In English, these two sounds are very similar. Try saying "I've got a cot" five times. The is really just an aspirated G.

Finally, if you aspirated a J, it would result in a "" sound. Try saying several times and you'll notice how similar the sounds are.

Let's match up the non-aspirated English sounds with their aspirated sound pairings. Go through each pairing and make the sounds right after one another.

See how similar these sounds really are?

Now let's add in the Korean characters that make these sounds. When we do this, see if you can spot some visual similarities in the characters - this can help greatly with memorization!

See the similarities? It's almost as if all we did was add a small horizontal line to each consonant to create the

aspirated equivalent. These four Korean characters are called the aspirated consonants, and are similar in sound to their non-aspirated

counterparts.

Let's make visual associations with these as well to really drill them in.

The ㅋ () could be compared to a key, while the ㅌ, which has a sound, could be associated with teeth (like the ones in your mouth or the teeth of a fork).

Next up, math review. Remember math class? We sure hope so!

Here's your quiz:

3.14159265359....

What's that number?

If you said pi, you'd be correct! And the Korean character with a similar sound to P looks very similar to the symbol for pi. That makes it easy to remember.

So there we have it. The first 12 characters learned!

But we said there were a total of 14 consonants in Korean, so what are the last two?

One of them is special, because it doesn't have a direct equivalent to an English letter. Instead, it represents a sound in English.

, the character representing the "" sound in English (as in ""),

looks like a church with a steeple at the top.

We can also remember it as an aspirated () and add an extra horizontal line at the top!