Since English is not a phonetic language there is not always a one-on-one relationship between the letters in the English alphabet and spoken sounds. This can cause problems when you want to pronounce English words.
The 26 letters in the English (Roman) alphabet make more than 26 spoken sounds. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, American English has 25 consonant sounds and 15 vowel sounds.
The position of a consonant within a word can change the way it sounds. This happens frequently when you are pronouncing English.
Let’s look at some sound-spelling situations that are frequently confusing to students who are learning to speak English. We’ll start with the letter “s”.
When you are speaking English the “s” can represent several different sounds depending on its location in a word.
In the word soup the “s” sounds like /s/.
In the word leisure the “s” sounds like /zh/.
In the word desert the “s” sounds like /z/.
The fact that “s” has three sounds can be very confusing when you are learning to pronounce English from a written text!
Let’s look at some English words that begin with the consonant “c”.
city, century, cat, cut
The letter “c” in the words city and century sounds like /s/.
The letter “c” in the words cat and cut sounds like /k/.
The pronunciation rule is that “c” sounds like /s/ when it falls before the vowels “i” and “e”. It sounds like /k/ when it falls before the vowels “a”, “o” and “u”.
Since English is not phonetic you will need to learn some of these sound/spelling patterns if you want to improve your American English pronunciation.
I teach more about American English Consonant and Vowel Sounds in my Accent Reduction Class.