Ng, double consonants and consonant clusters

Although ng consists of two letters, it stands for one back-of-tongue consonant: ming (thousand), tong (dawn), dengiz (sea). But sometimes the letters n and g stand side by side and denote two separate sounds, so we must be able to tell them apart. The easy way is to divide the word into syllables: ng always stays inside one syllable (de-ngiz, si-ngil, bod-ring), while separate n and g fall into two syllables (kun-ga, non-ga, ko‘rin-gan). In words borrowed from other languages n and g are always separate sounds: tan-go, fla-min-go.