안녕하세요 [Annyeonghaseyo]! Thank you all for joining me once again. Sorry that I have not updated this in a long while. I have been very busy lately, and I apologize for that.

Anyway, moving on. I was hoping to find some sound bites or something so that I could show you the audio of all these and the previous lessons. However, I could not, so we will just have to make due with this.

So... *clears throat* For today's lesson, we again have our esteemed guest: Yesung 오빠 [oppa]!

He will assisting us in the first part of our lesson: Know Your Characters: Korean Vowels Part 1- The Basics

In the Korean language, there are 21 vowels. But don't worry! We'll take this slow. 

Before we begin, recall the patterns we use for constructing Korean syllables:

C + V     and     C + V + C

Notice that in both patterns the vowel goes in the second position. Some vowels are written to the right of the consonant while others are written below. We'll see examples of both of these in just a moment.

Vertical Basic Vowels:

There are three verical basic vowels (these are the ones that go on the right of the consonant). These are ㅏ,ㅓ, andㅣ.

ㅏ= a

ㅓ= eo

ㅣ= i

ㅏ is our first vertical vowel. It sounds very similar to the "a" in "want".

Ex: 아이스크림 = [aiseu keurim] ice cream

      아빠 = [appa] dad

      아이 = [ai] child, offspring

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