Before any letters: the four things that change inside your mouth, and why this course never spells Korean in the Latin alphabet.
Reference only — we recommend against learning from it. Here is why.
You are about to learn an alphabet that was designed, on purpose, in 1443, by people who had studied where sounds come from in the body. That is unusual. Most alphabets were inherited and patched. Korean was engineered — and several of its consonant letters are literally small drawings of the mouth making that sound.
Which means there is a shortcut available to you that does not exist for most writing systems: if you learn what your mouth is doing, the letters start explaining themselves.
The four dials
Every sound in every language is made by moving a small number of things. Korean uses four of them, and almost every mistake an English speaker makes is one of these four set wrong.
1Where the hump of your tongue sits
High or low, toward the front or the back. This is what separates one vowel from another, and it is the thing you have the least conscious feel for.
ㅏ — low, flatㅣ — high, forward
2What your lips are doing
Rounded and pushed forward, or stretched flat. Two Korean vowels differ by nothing else at all — which is why you need a mirror.
ㅡ — flatㅜ — rounded
3How much air escapes
Korean has a whole consonant family defined by a hard puff of breath, and another defined by almost none. English uses air too, but never as the main difference between two words.
ㄱ — a little airㅋ — a lot of air
4How tight your throat is
Squeezing the larynx shut before releasing gives you the tense consonants. Nothing in English works this way, so this one has to be built from scratch.
ㄱ — relaxedㄲ — squeezed
How to read the diagrams
Every sound in this course comes with a cross-section of a head facing right. The throat is on the left, the lips are on the right. The pink mass is your tongue. The purple line is the air.
This is ㄴ: tongue tip on the ridge, soft flap dropped, air out through the nose.
The pink shape
Your tongue. Watch how far up it goes, and whether the high point is toward the front or the back.
The pale slab above it
The roof of your mouth. Hard and arched in the middle, soft and floppy at the back — that soft flap is what opens and closes the route to your nose.
The pale space above that
Your nasal cavity. When the soft flap drops, air goes up here and out through your nose. That is the only difference between ㅂ and ㅁ.
The purple line
The air. Follow where it goes and where it stops.
A pink starburst
A complete blockage that is released — a stop bursting open.
A pink cross
A blockage that is never released. This is what happens at the bottom of a Korean syllable, and it is the hardest habit for English speakers.
The line at the bottom
Your vocal folds. A wave means they are buzzing; a dashed line means they are not.
Three things to have next to you
A mirror, or your phone camera. Half of Korean vowel work is lip shape, and you cannot feel lip shape reliably — you have to see it.
A narrow strip of paper, about the width of two fingers. You will hold it in front of your mouth to see how much air a consonant releases. This single test separates ㄱ from ㅋ from ㄲ better than any explanation.
Two fingers on your throat, at the front, on the lump. That is your larynx. You are going to feel it buzz, relax, and squeeze shut.
That is the whole orientation. Next: six vowels, and by the end of that page you will be reading real Korean words — no letters borrowed from anywhere.
Practice this with an AI tutor
HanDa corrects every sentence you write or say — in real conversation, not flashcards.