The Korean alphabet was invented by King Sejong the Great, the fourth king of Korea's Joseon Dynasty as a way of transcribing the common speech of the people. At the time, the class of literate elite used Chinese characters. The project was completed in December of 1443 or January of 1444 and published with an explanatory manual in 1446, five years before Christopher Columbus was born, around the time harpsichords were being invented in Europe. Sejong organized the consonants by place of articulation and manner of articulation and tried to model the characters on how the lips, mouth, or tongue looked in making that sound. The manners of articulation included plain, aspirated, and tense, and these are what we'll look at in this post.
Plain consonants:
ㄱ [g], ㄷ [d], ㅂ [b], ㅈ [j], & ㅅ [s].
The first four of these have corresponding aspirated versions: consonants that are articulated in the same place but are said with a puff of air.
Aspirated consonants:
ㅋ [k], ㅌ [t], ㅍ [p], ㅊ [ch]
The English letters in brackets are not exact, just approximates to give you an idea. Sometimes ㄷ is romanized as a [t] rather than a [d] and the ㅂ as a [p] instead of a [b], but this way of romanizing makes the aspiration part more clear. Just remember that the aspirated versions are said with an added puff of air.
Finally, there are 'tense' or double consonants, which are like the plain ones but are said with more muscle tension:
ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ ㅆ.
So for our symmetric consonants, we have:
ㄱ ㄷ ㅂ ㅈ ㅅ (plain)
ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅊ -- (aspirated)
ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ ㅆ (tense)
The consonants in each column all of the same place of articulation and are based on the same basic character, which is meant to reflect that place of articulation.
ㄱ, ㅋ, & ㄲ are velar, and ㄱ is meant to show the back of the tongue touching the soft palate of a left-facing speaker.
ㄷ, ㅌ, & ㄸ are alveolar, and they are actually based off of the nasal consonant with this place of articulation, ㄴ, which shows the tip of the tongue at the ridge behind teeth of a left-facing speaker. (Both of these examples were in my first Korean post).
ㅂ, ㅍ, & ㅃ are labial, and they are based off of the nasal labial [m] sound, ㅁ, which is an abstract representation of the lips or the outline of the mouth.
The remaining five are all dental, and are based off of the character ㅅ, which is an abstract representation of a tooth.
I've already introduced ㅇ, and since there are only two more consonants after that I might as well finish it out. As a reminder, ㅇ has no value and is kind of a place holder when it appears as an initial consonant. As a bottom, syllable final consonant (or pach'im, as they call it), it has a [ng] sound as in sing. ㅎ is an [h] sound, and I suppose it can be thought of as the aspirated version of the place-holder ㅇ, though that's just out of my own head. Then there is ㄹ, and I'm quite honestly not sure how it fits into this. I'd have to do some research on it. It is written as if it is a combination of ㄱ on top and ㄷ on the bottom, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with its sounds. Like ㅇ, its sound changes depending on whether it appears as an initial consonant or as a pach'im. As an initial consonant, the sound is somewhere between [l] and [r], most similar to the flapped r of Spanish. I think it's actually misleading to gloss this as an r sound because the tongue actually makes contact with the ridge behind the teeth, so especially when it comes between syllables it sounds to me more like a "d". So for example, in Korean, head is 머리, which sounds more like "muh-dee" to me than "muh-ree". When ㄹ appears as a pach'im, as in 물 (water), it sounds like [ll] as in full. So 물 is pronounced "mool". My only guess as to the relation of how it written and how it sounds is that (ignoring the ㄱ on top), it seems to be based off the ㄴ character, like ㄷ, and it seems to have that same alveolar place of pronunciation. To get the more authentic answer, I suppose you'd do best to research what King Sejong actually said about the character in his explanatory manual well over 500 years ago. Hopefully there's a translation, because I imagine it would have had to have been written using Chinese characters. Incidentally, how about a picture of me with a statue of King Sejong? eh? eh?
Some final notes. You already know how ㅇ and ㄹ sound as pach'im. ㅁ and ㄴ sound exactly the same whether initial or pach'im. As a rule for the rest of the consonants, you don't release the sound when they appear as pach'im. To get what I mean, say "Bob", then say it again but this time keep your lips together at the end. That's how it should sound in Korean. This means that ㅂ & ㅍ sound exactly the same when they come at the end of a syllable, as do ㄱ, ㅋ, & ㄲ (for some reason, the only tense consonants that appear as pach'im seem to be ㄲ and ㅆ; I never see ㅃ, ㅉ, or ㄸ used as pach'im). Finally, ㄷ, ㅌ, ㅅ, ㅆ, ㅈ, ㅊ, and ㅎ all sound the same as pach'im: the sound is stopped but not released at the ridge behind the teeth (it can still make a difference which letter is used, but I'll save that for another post). And lastly: there's no separate character for [sh] in Korean, but sometimes ㅅ sounds like [sh] rather than just [s]. Basically, whenever it is followed by an ㅣ vowel, it takes on some of the palatization of the "ee" sound and sounds more like [sh].
With that, I'll leave you with the list of Korean consonants, along with their English approximates, in their alphabetical order. The tense double consonants don't appear here because they begin few enough words that those words are just added to the end of the section of the plain letters. For instance, you can find ㄲ words at the end of the ㄱ section.
So here you are. The Korean consonants:
ㄱ - "g"/"k"
ㄴ - "n"
ㄷ - "d"/"t"
ㄹ - initial: a flapped "r", pach'im: "ll"
ㅁ - "m"
ㅂ - "b"/"p"
ㅅ - "s"/"sh"
ㅇ - initial: no value, pach'im: "ng"
ㅈ - "j"
ㅊ - "ch"
ㅋ - "k"
ㅌ - "t"
ㅎ - "h"
(You can see all 3 posts about Korean so far by clicking the 'Korean' tag below.)
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