English words are not always pronounced the way they look. An English word doesnt always tell you how it is pronounced. In some languages, you can read a word and know immediately how the word is pronounced. You cant do that with a lot of words in English.
However, if you know the IPA symbols that represent the sounds of American English pronunciation, you can look up any word in the dictionary and know immediately how it is pronounced.
Phonetics
Now, we are going to be looking at phonetic pronunciation.
I am TIMIR from myabcenglish.com. So what is phonetics? Phonetics is study of the actual sounds that makes up the word of a language. Every language has its own characteristics and there are sounds in English that you might not use in your language, and sounds in your language that we might not use in English.
And one of the most difficult things about English is the spelling and pronunciation. We only have 26 letters in the alphabets but the model English uses about 44 different sounds. So when you look at the word, it can be difficult to know, from the spelling, how to pronounce it because the same letters can be pronounce differently in different words.
Look at these examples. Busy, Word, Queue, Laughter, Comb and Chaos. All of these sounds and many more can be difficult to pronounce because spelling in English is not phonetic and its often inconsistent. So phonetics gets around this by looking at the actual sound that make up a word and how it is spelt.
There are three sections to the chart.
Single vowel sounds and the Diphthongs. Consonant pairs and single consonant. The key to good pronunciation is to understand making the sound of speech is a physical thing, If you are not accustomed to speaking English wont feel natural for you to use and your mouth and tongue in the way that you need to.
So if you want to improve your pronunciation.
Think about these questions.
Where does each sound come from?
Is the jaw open or close? What shape is my mouth?
Where should my tongue be?
Does air come out of my tongue my mouth when I say the sound?
Is it voiced?
Incorrect pronunciation is almost always the result of trying to produce the sound in way that is physically incorrect. If we look at these pronounced words again, we can spell them out using the phonetics symbols to see exactly how they are pronounced.
Busy- here we can see that the u does not make the sound we might expect. Instead it makes the /i/ sound. It is not boozy or buzzy, its busy word the o here, together with the r, is pronounced /3:/ and thats confusing because that sound if often spell with e-r
Queue this word has a lot more letters than you might expect and most of them are just silent.
Laughter You might expect there to be an r in the Laughter but there isnt also the f sounds is represented by ty=he letters gh, this is a very unusual spelling and caused a lot of confusion.
Comb. This word has a b at the end but we do not pronounce it. And finally chaos. This is spelt with the Ch and Ch is more commonly pronounced? /tS? Like in Church, but in Chaos it is /k/ like in cat. So you can see how there are many inconsistencies in English between spelling and pronunciation.
So phonetics gives us a way to write words as they are pronounced. We have also made a video summarizing the most common errors that people makes with pronunciation. If you are having problems and want to improve why you dont have a look, you will probably find something that will help you.
We talk about Minimal Pairs which are when two sounds are often confused, like /l/ and /r/. Consonant Clusters this is when there are several consonants together without any words and that produces a sound that can be difficult to produce.
Phonetic Chart Explained
Here, we are going to be looking at the phonetic chart.
At first it looks like a meaningless collection of symbols. But each symbol represents a different sound.
In spoken form, most of the English language can be broken down into 44 separate sounds. The phonetic chart shows us how these sounds relate to each other. There are three sections to the chart.
Single Vowel Sounds or Monophthongs, Diphthongs , and the Consonants Pairs and Single Consonants
Phonetic Chart Explained: Vowels
The first section is single vowel sounds. These are also sometimes called Monophthongs. When we think about the alphabet we normally think of there being 5 vowels A, E, I, O, U.
However, there are many ways that these letters are pronounced, so the pronunciation is very inconsistent. This makes things difficult when learning English especially as in many other languages the vowels sounds are pronounced more consistently with how they they are spelled.
On the top row we have the sounds
/I/
//
//
/u/
With all these sounds the mouth is almost closed and the sound is made at the top of the mouth. That is why they are on the top row.
On the second row we have the sounds
/e/
//
//
//
Now the mouth is open a little more and it feels like the sounds comes straight out through the middle of the mouth. That is why they are on the middle row.
On the bottom row we have the sounds
//
//
//
//
To make these sounds our mouths should be almost wide open and it feels like the sound is coming from the bottom of the mouth. That is why they are on the bottom row.
The columns are also important because they give us an idea of the position of the tongue.
With the left column the tongue is at the front.
/i/
/e/
//
The tongue moves back a little for the second column.
//
//
//
Back a little more for the third.
//
//
//
And now finally at the back
/u/
//
//
Phonetic Chart Explained: Diphthongs
Diphthongs are also vowel sounds, but they are combinations of two vowel sounds that appear together within the same syllable producing a new unique sound.
Theyre arranged according to the second sound.
In the first column we have the // sounds
//
//
/e/
In the second column we have the // sounds. We should note that the symbols for these diphthongs are written with the // symbol but the sound is often the longer but similar /i:/.
/e/
//
/a/
And in the third column we have the // symbol. Again sometimes the sound is more similar to the longer /u/.
//
/a/
Phonetic Chart Explained: Consonant Pairs
The third section is the consonant sounds, The first 2 rows are sometimes called consonant pairs. This is because the sounds of each pair are produced in a very similar way. Lets look at the first pair.
/p/ and /b/
The sound is similar but the physical shape of mouth is almost exactly the same. The only difference is /b/ is voiced which means that we use our vocal chords to produce the sound. If you feel you neck when you say the sound you should feel some vibration. Now if you say /p/, if you say it correctly you will not feel that vibration.
The same is true of the next pair
/t/, and /d/
/d/ is voiced and /t/ isnt.
// and //
/k/ and /g/
/f/ and /v/
// and //
/s/ and /z/
// and //
Phonetic Chart Explained: Single Consonants
Finally in the bottom row we have the single consonants
/m/
//
/h/
