Teachers and students of English often come across many new words. Looking at the spelling of many new words does not always help one to pronounce them correctly. A single letter in English can represent several different sounds. For example, the letter 'a' sounds different in 'sad' and 'car'.

Again, take the words cat, kite and chemistry. The initial sound for each of these words is the same, /k/, although they are spelled with three different letters c-, k- and ch-.

What can teachers or students then do when they do not know how to pronounce or say a new word? They can look the word up in a dictionary.

All the words that a dictionary contains are known as entries. For each entry, immediately after the word comes the information about how to pronounce that word. To understand that one needs to know the English sound symbols.

Each symbol stands for a sound you hear in English. Each sound is known as a phoneme. In phonemic transcription, a word is written according to its basic sounds within two slashes /-/.

For example /pIn/ consists of three phonemes: /p/, /I/, /n/. Thus, cat in phonemic transcription would be /k t/.

Learn the symbols for English sounds from the the sound symbol chart given below.

English Sound SymbolChart

Notice that the chart is divided into four colours.

The blue section contains symbols of some consonant sounds that correspond to the sound of the letters as we know them. Two example words for each symbol are given below.

The one sound in this section that speakers of Bangla usually have a problem with is represented by the symbol /z/ as in zoo or zebra, since this sound is not there in Bangla language, speakers of Bangla need to learn this sound. Otherwise, they may pronounce the initial sound in zoo as the initial sound in Jew.

The purple section contains sound symbols which are not possible to recognize unless one learns them. Two example words for each sound symbol are given below.

The yellow section of the chart contains the vowel sounds in English.
The symbols for the sounds and example words with those sounds are given below:

The green section of the chart contains symbols of sounds which have two vowel sounds together. These are called 'dipthongs'.
Example words for the dipthongs or the two vowel sounds together are given below.