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

Consonants

Symbols

When you are learning pronunciation there are some strange symbols that you should know. The basic ones are on this page:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.



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