Plain Consonants

Blocks cannot start with a vowel, so when a block needs to start with a vowel sound, the ㅇ letter is a silent placeholder when in the initial position of a block. You’ll notice many of the letters have two different sounds; the first sound is when the consonant appears at the start of a syllable block, and the second sound is when it appears at the end of a syllable, called a 받침 (batchim).

Tense Consonants

Once you know the plain consonants, it is easy to learn the tense consonants, which are simply doubled versions of some of the plain consonants. A few of these can only be used in the initial position within a block. To correctly pronounce these and the last group of consonants, you’ll need to ask a Korean speaker for verbal examples as the Romanization does not accurately portray their different sounds.

Aspirated Consonants

The last group of consonants are aspirated forms of a few previous consonants and are written in a similar way to the plain versions.