Get Rid of your Accent (Introduction)

The English alphabet has 26- letters, 5 Vowels and 21 consonants. These are enough to write English.As there is a difference between writing and Pronunciation in English,we need another alphabet representing all the speech sounds. Such an alphabet is called the phonetic alphabet.In order to pronounce English we need 44 sounds called Phonemes or distinctive sound unites.The English alphabet contains 44 Symbols, representing the 44 characteristics sounds of English .

Speech sounds can be broadly classified into Vowels and consonants.Vowels of the phonetic alphabet are quite different from the Vowels of the English Alphabet.They are 22 in number. 12 of them are Pure Vowels and the remaining 8 are called diphthongs. Diphthongs are otherwise called vowels-glides.

There are 24 consonants sounds in English .they belong to various classes and the students who do not specialize in phonetics need not study them in detail.Vowels and consonants arranged in a particular way give us syllables,and syllables into phrases and sentences.
speech consists of sentences.

By learning the Phonetic symbols, one will be able to refer to the Dictionary and find out the correct Pronunciation of words . we can get the correct or standard Pronunciation of English words from the English Pronunciation Dictionary by Daniel Jones or from any edition of the OXFORD DICTIONARY ....