Welcome
Introduction
This website is to help you learn about pronunciation. If you really want to check that you are pronouncing something correctly, ask a teacher to help you.
Lessons
By the end of these 10 lessons you should be able to:
- recognise the phonemic symbols of English
- recognise the sounds of English
- tell the difference between these sounds
- say these sounds
- know the common spellings of these sounds
- pronounce some words containing these sounds
Lesson Index
These are the lessons in this program. Click a button to choose a lesson. Click a symbol for more details.
Vowels
- Lesson 1 - /iː/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/ & /uː/
- Lesson 2 - /e/, /ə/, /ɜː/ & /ɔː/
- Lesson 3 - /æ/, /ʌ/, /ɑː/ & /ɒ/
- Lesson 4 - /ɪə/, /eɪ/, /ʊə/ & /ɔɪ/
- Lesson 5 - /əʊ/, /eə/, /aɪ/ & /aʊ/
Consonants
Symbols
When you are learning pronunciation there are some strange symbols that you should know. The basic ones are on this page:
- Two diagonal lines with a letter in the middle; e.g. /e/ means that this is a sound, not a spelling. You may also see symbols in square brackets; e.g. [ ], these include sounds that are not in English.
- If you see a mark like this : after a symbol, it means that the symbol has a long sound; e.g. /iː/
Phonemic Alphabet
These are the characters that represent sounds in the phonemic alphabet. Move your mouse on the phonemic alphabet and click the image to hear it.