자 (jah) = Might sound like "cha," however the ㅊ Korean consonant has a stronger "ch" pronunciation. Think of ㅈ as a soft J sound.
I believe you are referring to the hangul ㅈ. It is pronounced a voiceless 'j' sound in the beginning of a word or after consonants, a voiced 'j' between vowels and of course, a 't' stop sound as a coda (at the end of a syllable before consonants, or the end of a phrase).
Pronouncing Pinyin's "j" Sound
The tip of your tongue should be down behind your lower front teeth when making this sound, just as it is for the "x-" and "q-" sounds. If you try to make an English "j" sounds with your tongue in this new position, you should be to make the pinyin "j-" sound.
But in Korean there's a "tense" version of many of these consonants that are pronounced with more emphases. These are represented by writing the non-aspirated consonant twice. So ㅈ becomes ㅉ which transliterates to "jj".
In reality, however the “jota” (or J) in Spanish makes a unique sound that doesn't really exist in English. You can approximate it with an H sound (such as in “hello” and “hard”).
CH = /K/ In words of Greek origin, “ch” is usually pronounced as /k/. The word character, for example, comes from the classical Greek kharaktēr (meaning “engraved mark”). More examples of words with the /k/ sound are anchor, chaos, echo, mechanic, orchestra, psychology, school, and stomach.
To produce the j sound, raise the sides of your tongue to the roof of your mouth and voice out through your mouth while lowering the back of your tongue. The middle and front of your tongue should be touching the roof of your mouth to begin with.
The English Alphabet consists of 26 letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.
j, tenth letter of the alphabet.
Jeon Jung-kook (Korean: 전정국) was born on September 1, 1997, in Busan, South Korea.
The ch and j consonants come under the group known as the affricates. The affricates are produced by a combination of complete obstruction of the airway and then forcing the air through a narrow opening of the mouth.
K: The only time C is pronounced as a soft “ch” sound in Italian is when it's followed by the letter i or e.
The letters CH can be pronounced three ways: CH, K, SH. The letters CH are pronounced CH most of the time. If a word is Greek in derivation, then pronounce it K like in stomach, chemistry. If a word is French in derivation, then pronounce it as SH like in Chicago, machine, and mustache.
Some of you may be happy to know that we have at this point only one English word in which the j is silent: marijuana.
The letter J in English has always been pronounced the same way since it was introduced. It replaced the Old English letters cg which had the same sound: In English, ⟨j⟩ most commonly represents the affricate /dʒ/. In Old English the phoneme /dʒ/ was represented orthographically with ⟨cg⟩ and ⟨cȝ⟩.
There is no language which has the letter J which does not have a sound for it.
Unlike other East-Asian languages, Korean isn't a tonal language. This means, that the meaning of the word doesn't change, regardless of what your accent is like. This makes learning Korean much easier than Japanese.
Korean is considered to be much easier than Japanese. There are more letters in the Japanese alphabet than in Korean. Japanese also contains more complicated Chinese characters and difficult grammar.
Further, the Koreans are more closely related to the Japanese and quite distant from the Chinese. The above evidence of the origin of Koreans fits well with the ethnohistoric account of the origin of Koreans and the Korean language.