Phonetic Chart - English Language Club

Improve you English pronunciation with the interactive Phonetic chart App from the English Language club.

Phonetics is the science of pronunciation. It can be helpful for people learning English because one of the most difficult things about the language is the spelling and pronunciation. English is not very phonetic and as a result the same letters are often pronounced in many different ways in different words.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) helps by providing a way to write words as they are pronounced. The normal alphabet only has 26 characters but there are 44 different sounds that are used to pronounce words. As well as that, most word in English originate from other languages like Greek, Latin and French to name just a few and in many cases the the language of origin influences how the word is pronounced.

The IPA provides a symbol (phoneme) for each sound so the correct pronunciation can be written or printed in dictionaries.

Click on the symbols to hear them pronounced as they should sound in British English.