As a person native to a language with no ejective-aspirated distinction I don't know how to learn to pronounce the ejective consonants in Georgian. The formal descriptions (e.g. on wikipedia) are not helpful for me and the native speakers of Georgian I know pronounce it intuitively and are unable to explain. What is the fastest way to train yourself?

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    I also found Georgians couldn't explain it but for me I could get it by combinging what I read in Wikipedia with trying to mimic the native speakers. For me it's much much easier than learning tones in tonal languages or extra vowels and diphthings. – hippietrail May 26 '16 at 8:33

The way I learned is as follows:

  1. Train yourself to become aware of your glottis and perform a glottal stop at will. You can train pronouncing 'uh-oh' and observing what happens between those syllabes. Also when coughing, you will close your glottis before the cough. You may also try to inhale air and try to stop the flow with your throat. Train youself to close your glottis without pronouncing any sound. With your glottis closed it should be impossible for you to inhale or exhale. So if you can put your glottis in a state where you can push a little with your lungs and not exhale any air, you are good.
  2. Try with კ [k'] first. First: place your tongue as if you tried to pronouce an ordinary [k] sound. This should obstruct the airflow completely. Second: perform the glottal stop as you learned above. You can feel a little pressure building between your glottis and your tongue. Third: release your tongue without opening your glottis. You should hear the sound when the pressure built up is released.
  3. When comfortable with the step-by-step method above try to perform this faster and with a vowel after the ejective sound. Or train some words containing ejective consonants.

The method above allowed me to learn ejective sounds in a short time and two Georgian native speakers confirmed that I pronounce them correctly.

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