Very Simple Korean

A Korean consonant: ㄱ
A Korean vowel: ㅏ
A Korean word: 가

Simple enough? The consonant comes in front of the vowel, so far just like English.

An English consonant: G
An English vowel: o
An English word: Go

가 is the verb stem of the Korean verb that means to go. It can be used alone to mean "Go away." You now know enough Korean to watch this video.

These two examples, "가" & "Go", are both one-syllable words that begin with a consonant and end with a vowel. Now let's add a syllable-final consonant. In English, we just tack it on the end:

Consonant: G
Vowel: o
Consonant: d
Word: God

In Korean, that consonant instead goes beneath, as follows:

Consonant: ㄱ
Vowel: ㅏ
Consonant: ㅇ
Word: 강

The advantage of this is that written Korean is visually split up into syllables: each syllable takes the space of one square. So 가 and 강 are each one syllable and 강남대학교 is five syllables. This is nice because words look their length. (Unlike in English, in which "era" is longer than "droughts".)

On to pronunciation.ㄱ is somewhere between a G and a K, and "ㅏ" is an "ah" sound, so "가" is pronounced like "kah" or "gah". The word 강, which means river, is pronounced gahng. The nice thing is that, unlike in English with Go and God, the the vowel sound doesn't change when we add the syllable final "ng" (ㅇ) sound. As far as I know this is always the case in Korean so it is usually very straightforward to pronounce.

To get nitpicky, though: The place of articulation of ㄱ is actually farther back in the mouth than either G or K (at least how I say them), at the root of the tongue. The character ㄱ is actually designed as a visual representation of this. If you imagine a left-facing speaker, it shows the back of the tongue pulled up to touch the rear part of the roof of the mouth. (Likewise, the character for an [n] sound, ㄴ, shows the tip of the tongue behind the teeth.)

A note about the round character, ㅇ. When it comes at the bottom of a syllable, like in 강, it is pronounced like ng, but when it comes in the initial position it's just a place holder with no sound value. This is because letters can't stand alone in Korean the way they can in English (in the particle "a" or the pronoun "I"). So "ㅇ" takes the initial consonant position in syllables that begin with a vowel sound. For example, while 나 is pronounced "nah", 아 is simply "ah."

I'll teach you two more easy vowel sounds while I'm at it:ㅣand ㅗ. The first is just a vertical line and is pronounced "ee" as in see. The second is pronounced "oh" as in go. Notice that the long stroke of the second vowel is horizontal rather than vertical. With this kind of vowel, the initial consonant goes above it rather than to its left. So you should be able to figure out the following sounds:

1.아이
2.오
3.온기
4.가강
5.공
6.아니오

1. ah-ee (child)
2. oh (five)
3. ohn-gee (warmth)
4. gah-gahng (riverside)
5. gohng (ball)
6. ah-nee-oh (no)

At least some of Korean should be less mysterious to you now. Even though I've only taught you three consonants (ㄱ,ㅇ,ㄴ) and three vowels (ㅏ,ㅣ,ㅗ) you get the basic idea of how it's laid out. Now for the last word:

가자!

This is pronounced Kah-Jah. It is based off of the verb stem 가, includes the consonant ㅈ, and it means "Let's go."