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PRONOUNCING ENGLISH SOUNDS
We use the 26 letters of the alphabet in english writing. However, when speaking there are roughly 44 different sounds in English. We call these sounds phonemes.
If you're concentrating on the sounds of English, there are 44 characters to represent them all. One way of doing this is to use the 'phonemic alphabet', which has some extra characters to represent the sounds in English for which there is no clear equivalent letter or letters.
Writing with phonemes
You can use phonemes 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 phonemes (sounds) and not letters phonemic 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.
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