Basic Phonetics

Nieves Ferrís & Patricio García

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What is a Phonemic Chart?

A phonemic chart, like this one from pearson.com, is a set of symbols that represent the sounds of English. There are a total of 44 phonemes in (British) English, but only 26 letters.

The symbols used in a phonemic chart come from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). These are the same symbols that you’ll see when you look up a word in the dictionary.

Vowels

The English language has 12 different vocalic sounds. What this means is that the 5 letters (A, E, I, O, U) can be pronounced using 12 different sounds. English vowels can be short or long (:). And there are eight diphthongs.

Consonants

The English language has 24 consonant sounds. Some consonants are voiced ( you can feel vibration in your local chords) and some are voiceless.

Link to pronunciation videos

Stress

Stress can occur on both, syllables in a word (word stress) and words in a sentence (sentence stress). Word stress (') is shown before the stressed syllable /ˈtʃɒk.lət/ (chocolate) and mistakes in word stress can change the meaning or type of word.

Stress

Sentence stress occurs when we say certain words more loudly and with more emphasis than others.In English we stress content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) because they are essential to the meaning of the sentence.

Silent letters

In English many times we find letters that are written but NOT pronounced. Here are some examples: A (logically), B (climb, plumber), C (muscle, scissors), D (Wednesday, handsome), E (like, name), G (high, sign), H (hour, what), I (business), K (know, knife), L (could, walk), M (mnemonic), N (autumn, hymn), O (colonel), P (psychology, receipt), R (especially in final position in BrE), S (island, isle), T (listen, castle), U (guard, guest), W (two, who)

Main difficulties for Spanish speakers

⁃ Spanish vowels aren't short nor long ⁃ Spanish vowels aren't weakened so much as in English ⁃ Consonants are more intensely pronounced in English rather than in Spanish ⁃ Some consonant clusters are strange in Spanish (/pt/, /kt/...) ⁃ Non-existent English sounds are replaced by similar Spanish ones (W>g, j>y...) ⁃ Overaccentuation of non-important words

Let's play!!

Vowels and diphthongs

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Consonants