If you're concentrating on the sounds of English, you need 44 characters to represent them all. One way of doing this is to use a common group of sound symbols. It has some extra characters which represent the sounds in English for which there is no clear equivalent letter or letters.

Writing with sound symbols
You can use these symbols to write out the pronunciation of words and in many dictionaries for English learners you will see the pronunciation written out. To show that what is written are sounds and not letters the transcriptions are written between slashes, / /.

For example, the pronunciation of the word 'pet' is written:
/pet/

There are different kinds of sounds, consonants and vowels.

Consonant sounds:
There are 24 of these. 16 of these are in voiced and unvoiced pairs.

Unvoiced
Voiced
Other

Vowel Sounds.
There are 20 vowel sounds, five of these are 'long' sounds and eight are diphthongs (double sounds)

Short
Long
Diphthongs

Exercise:
Every letter of the alphabet when said individually contains a vowel sound. In this exercise you have to match the letter to the vowel sound. This download contains the answers.

Sounds of the alphabet exercise (20k)

Listen to the sounds
To listen to the sounds, follow the link below.

The chart will open in a new window and requires Flash. Its size is 144k so it may take a while to load depending on your connection speed.

Sound symbol chart with audio >>