Vowels in American English

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Vowels

In English certain letters represent Consonant sounds and others represent Vowel Sounds.   The vowels are fewer but more complicated.

In the chart above, the dark Blue letters are always Vowels while Y shown in light blue is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant.

Each Vowel is said to have two sounds - Long and Short.

The Long Vowel says the name of the Vowel such as A in Cake; E in Key; I in Ice; O in Oh; and U in which is how You sounds. (you can hear that U actually starts with a Y sound which is why You and the Long U sound alike; that’s important later for using articles a or an)

Each Vowel also has a short sound - a as in apple; e as in egg; i as in is; o as in not; and u as in cut.

However there is one more sound each vowel can make.  That sound is called Schwa.  The schwa sound is the sound you hear when you say China.  That last sound - uh is the schwa.

about (a); elephant (second e); uniform (i); month (o) 

the short U and the Schwa have almost the same sound and in American English you may not be able to hear any difference - I usually can’t.  So cut - is that short u or schwa?  Don’t worry about it.  You will be understood since the difference is only the length of the sound.

Look back at my first blog - 44 Sounds of English to see the American Phonic System and the IPA showing these sounds also.

The Magic E -  Vowel-Consonant - E

MAT MET MIT MOT MUT - short vowel

MATE METE MITE MOTE MUTE - now long vowel

Finally, you should be aware that when 2 or more vowels are together, they produce different sounds.  oo together has two different sounds as in book and moon.

In American English, -er; -ir and -ur have the exact same sound.  So her, first, and fur all produce the same sound in American English.

-ear as shown in my chart has 2 different sounds possible.  It can say ear or air so bear says bair not beer (ear).  Tear (ear) is different from  Tear (Tair) - both words are spelled the same but pronounced differently.

So learning to speak English correctly takes time.  Don’t get discouraged.

This blog is designed to introduce you to English Phonics but hearing it better than reading it here so I recommend that if you want to improve your sounds, visit Keenyn Rhodes at  https://www.clearenglishcorner.com/.  She is very good at illustrating how to say the sounds of English.  She has some YouTube Videos also.  And if you are wondering, there is no connection between us - I don’t make any money referring you to her site.  She is simply much better than I am at teaching phonics especially online.  

The 44 Sounds of American English

        Welcome to a New World - ESL

I am going to start with phonics although English is not a true phonetic language.  But to learn to speak any langauge, you need to master the sounds of that language.  So the first few blog posts will be about the Sounds of English.  I will focus on American English.  

In American English there are about 44 sounds formed from the 26 letters in the English Alphabet.  I say about because some dialects (regional variances) may have more or less.

In the United States, people tend to use the American Phonetic system shown in this photo from Scholastic book  Phonics from A to Z (2nd Edition) by Wiley Blevins (I see there is now a 3rd edition).  We talk about long and short vowels - I’ll discuss vowels in the next blog post.

 

In China where I taught for 7 years, they use the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA.  I have edited an American English IPA chart to add sample words.

 

There is an app available for Apple phones and iPads (free or paid; I use the free version) and I think it is from Macmillan publishing.  See images below. 

It may be available for Android devices also.  I have always used it on my iPad.  You can choose American or British Charts from the app settings and switch as you need.  It allows you to hear the sound in isolation.

 

Next blog - Vowels