Every sound English makes,
and how to make it.
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- Every sound has its own page
Where you block the air, and how you let it go
Every consonant is three facts: WHERE in the mouth you block the air (the columns, front of the mouth on the left), HOW you release it (the rows), and whether your voice is on. Two sounds sharing a cell differ only in that last one — which is why p and b, t and d, k and g, f and v, s and z each sit together.
| Release | Lips | Teeth+lip | Teeth | Ridge | Post-ridge | Palate | Soft palate | Throat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stops | ||||||||
| Fricatives | ||||||||
| Affricates | ||||||||
| Nasals | ||||||||
| Approximants |
Where the tongue sits, and how long you hold it
A vowel is your voice flowing freely while the mouth changes shape. Three dials do all of it: how high the tongue rides, how far forward it sits, and whether the lips round. Where two vowels share a cell they differ by tension and length rather than position — and those are the pairs learners merge.
| Tongue | Front | Central | Back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tongue high | |||
| Tongue mid | |||
| Tongue low |
Vowels that move
A diphthong starts on one vowel and glides to another inside a single syllable. Most languages have a few; English leans on them heavily, and flattening one is what turns “boat” into “bought” and “late” into “let”.
The sounds that cost learners the most
These are the sounds that change words rather than accent — the ones that make a listener hear something you did not say. Play the example, then open the sound.
as in “think”
as in “this”
as in “red”
as in “light”
as in “van”
as in “water”
as in “singer”
as in “about”
as in “in”
as in “eat”
as in “apple”
as in “genre”
Not sure which of these are yours?
Your first language decides it. Every sound page lists the typical transfer for more than twenty language groups — Hindi and Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Turkish and more — so you can read the one that applies to you and skip the rest.Train a contrast, not a sound
A sound you can make in isolation is not yet a sound you can use. What matters is whether a listener can tell it apart from its nearest neighbour — and the drill for that is the minimal pair: two words separated by exactly one sound, like ship and sheep, or right and light. Get it wrong and you have not said a slightly foreign version of the word; you have said a different word.
There are 247 of them here, grouped by contrast, each with a listening test and a recording you can score.
Longer reads on the sound system
The 44 phonemes of English
The full chart written out, with the history of why spelling and sound came apart.
The hardest English sounds, ranked
A countdown of the eight that cause the most trouble, and what to do about each.
Minimal pairs: a practice plan
Which contrasts matter for your first language, and a four-step drill protocol.
Straight answers
How many sounds does English have?
Forty-four in the standard teaching set: 24 consonants, 12 single vowels and 8 diphthongs. The exact count moves between 42 and 46 depending on the accent being described and on whether an analyst treats certain glides as one sound or two. This chart uses the 44-sound inventory, which is the one dictionaries and coursebooks assume.
Why does English have 26 letters but 44 sounds?
Because English spelling was fixed centuries after the pronunciation had already moved, and it borrowed words from languages with different spelling rules. That is why 'ough' has six pronunciations and why you cannot reliably read a sound off a spelling. The sound inventory is the stable thing; learn it and the spellings become variations on sounds you already own.
What is the difference between a phoneme and a letter?
A letter is written, a phoneme is heard. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that changes a word's meaning: swap /b/ for /p/ in 'bat' and you get 'pat'. One phoneme can be spelled many ways ('f' in fan, 'ph' in phone, 'gh' in laugh) and one spelling can carry several phonemes.
Which English sounds are hardest for non-native speakers?
The two TH sounds, the English R, the dark L at the end of a word, the /v/ and /w/ contrast, the NG at the end of a word, and the schwa — plus the vowel contrasts that change words rather than accent, especially short I against long E and short A against short E. Which ones affect you depends on your first language, which is why every sound page here lists the typical transfer for more than twenty language groups.
Do I need to learn IPA to improve my pronunciation?
You do not need to write it, but reading it pays for itself in a week. IPA is the only notation that tells you what a dictionary actually means, and it is what sayit shows you when it compares the sound you aimed for with the sound you made.
Say a sound and see whether it landed
Record one line in your browser and sayit scores every phoneme against its target in IPA — the same analysis a paying member gets, free, with no card.