Welcome to this pronunciation course.
Before we dive in and master all the
English sounds, let me just explain a few
things so that you can get the most out
of this course. Have a look at this word,
the word cough as you can see on the
screen. However what are those symbols in orange?
Well, these symbols represent the sounds. So cough the spelling has five
letters: C-O-U-G-H. But when we actually say the word cough, there are only three
sounds: /k/ // and /f/. /k/ // /f/ make cough. I just want to
highlight this because the relationship
between sound and spelling in English is
sometimes a bit odd, sometimes a bit
strange. But there are spelling and sound
relationship patterns. I want you to
start to notice the patterns between
sound and spelling. For example 'c' can
represent the sound /k/. But it can
also represent other sounds which we'll
see later in the course.
'gh' can represent the sound /f/ as you can see in the spelling cough. So just keep
these patterns and relationships in mind. The symbols that represent the sounds
in English, that you just saw in orange,
are the IPA symbols. IPA means
International Phonetic Alphabet, which
just means the sound alphabet. Now these
symbols are very good to learn. They will
help you with your pronunciation and you
will be able to read a new word
using the IPA. During this course, in
each lecture I'll show you the symbol,
the IPA symbol that represents each
sound. Do your best to try and learn
the different symbols which represent
the different sounds of English. Another thing I want to highlight is
that there are 26 letters in the English
alphabet, but how many sounds are there
in English? There are more than 40 sounds in English. What does this tell you? This
tells you that each letter in the
alphabet can represent more than one
sound. For example the letter 'c' in
English can represent the sound /k/ as
in cough. But it can also represent the
sound /s/ for example rice R-I-C-E rice.
Keep this in mind as well: some letters
can represent different sounds, not just
one. English doesn't have a one-to-one
relationship between spelling and sound.
Now let's move on to the first sounds.
See you in the next lecture.