The consonant ' ㅅ' of Hangul

 The consonant ' ㅅ ' is again interesting, because it is pronounced as a sharp ' s ' if it is in the beginning of a character, and as a 't ' if it is ate the end. 

Before the vowels ' 이, 야 , 여 , 요 , 유 ' it is pronounced as 'sh' though. We will soon learn these vosels.

Also as we will see later, this character exhibits some other interesting pronunciation issues depending on the surrounding consonants and vowels, which will keep us on our toes for some time. 

But for now, we'll keep things simple by considering pronunciation of a single character by itself.

ㅅ

swing [s] ship [ sh]  사자  [sa-ja ] : lion

Ca [t] 옷 [ot ] : clothes

The consonant ' o' has no sound at the beginning, but is pronounced ' ng' at the end of the character.

This character can be considered to be like a silent ' k' in English, such as in the words 'know' or 'knot'.

Recall the earlier rule that any character must start with a consonant? 

In the case when a word starts with a vowel, the voiceless ' o ' is used to precede the vowel.

This content was taken from the book [ Learning Korean with a smile] .