Letters with multiple sounds

Beginning Consonant Sounds in English - Learning Consonants

ABCmouse’s interactive reading games can help kids practice all the phonics fundamentals that build the foundation for successful and confident readers, including types of consonant sounds, short vowel sounds, and long vowel sounds.

Best of all, our fun reading games span the entire range of early reading. From the beginning of preschool through the end of second grade, you can rely on ABCmouse to help your child practice the fundamentals of beginning consonant sounds.

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In a study surveying more than 5,000 parents who use ABCmouse with their children, 85% of those parents reported a significant positive impact on their child’s learning.

The letters of the alphabet represent sounds that make up words. In order to read, your child needs to be able to identify these sounds.

Emerging readers practice recognizing beginning consonant sounds by listening to and then reading words and stories that have beginning consonants. For many children, practicing the ability to recognize sounds in words can make a big difference in how fast they learn to read.

Designed to help your child learn consonant sounds, ABCmouse provides many fun and interactive activities to develop their literacy skills, including the following: • Cutout Puzzles • Read-Aloud Books • Consonant Sound Games • Word-Building Activities • Alphabet Sound Books

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Created by expert teachers with decades of experience in early literacy instruction, ABCmouse is not only research based and proven to be effective—it also gets children excited about learning!

ABCmouse helps your child learn consonant sounds through original songs, puzzles, art activities, and printables. ABCmouse can help to build a strong foundation toward literacy that will continue to grow with your child as he or she progresses through ABCmouse activities.

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Consonants vs. Vowels

The alphabet is made up of 26 letters: 5 vowels and 21 consonants.

In English, vowels are the letters a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. Consonants are all the other letters in the alphabet that are not vowels, such as b, d, g, n, r, s, and t.

Consonant sounds are made by blocking air using your teeth, tongue, or lips. For example, say the beginning consonant sound in the word pad—“puh.” Your lips come together to block air to make the sound.

ABCmouse’s early childhood and elementary curriculum contains many activities and games designed to help your child practice consonant sounds.

Activities and songs on ABCmouse, such as “The Letter B Song,” help your child learn the difference between vowel sounds and consonant sounds, which is a key skill for beginning readers.

List of Consonants and Their Sounds

Placeholder paragraph Learning consonant sounds is important to sounding out and decoding words. Once your child knows these sounds, he or she can read and decode words, starting with beginning consonant sounds.

Fourteen consonants have only one sound: B, F, H, J, K, L M, N, P, R, T, V, W, and Z.

However, seven consonants can have more than one sound: C, G, D, S, Y, and X. The letter C, for example, can sound like an S (cell) or a K (cat). The letter G can make the sounds as in goat and gel.

It’s important for beginning readers to understand that some consonants make more than one sound. ABCmouse games and videos model these sounds accurately so that your child can start to learn, read, and spell sounds. Reading aloud with ABCmouse’s books will also help your child practice all types of consonant sounds.

Types of Consonant Sounds

Say the sound for the letter P, “puh.” Your lips comes together to block air to make the sound. Consonants are classified according to how they are produced—the type of consonant sound depends on how you use your mouth, teeth, and lips and how you move air when you make the sound.

ABCmouse’s early childhood and elementary curriculum contains many activities and games designed to help your child practice proper mouth and tongue formation when sounding out beginning consonant sounds.

Activities on ABCmouse, such as “First Letter in Line,” help your child listen for and use beginning consonant sounds. The sounds are isolated and then blended to show how letters work to build sounds and words.

Places of Articulation

Articulation is the act of making clear and distinct sounds. You make the sound of the letters P, B, and N by bringing your lips together. Your lips are one place of articulation. Some other places are

• your lower lip and your upper teeth: F and V.

• the tip of your tongue on your teeth: T, D, N, S, Z, and L.

• in the back of the mouth at the palate: K and G (when G makes the sound as in go).

• in the throat: H.

ABCmouse has many activities and books that will help your child hear different beginning consonant sounds, such as “Alphabet Sounds at the Zoo.”

Manner of Articulation

Consonant sounds have different manners, or ways, of articulation. When you make the sound of the letter S, for example, you put your tongue toward your teeth. Then, you push air through the opening to make the sound.

ABCmouse provides entertaining interactions for your child to hear articulation of types of consonant sounds, such as the book series Alphabet Sounds on the Farm.

Voiced vs. Unvoiced

When speaking, you use your vocal cords to make a voiced consonant sound. An unvoiced consonant sound doesn’t need your vocal cords.

Lightly place a finger on your throat when you make a consonant sound. If you feel vibrations, the consonant is a voiced sound. Dog, go, and man start with voiced consonant sounds.

Unvoiced consonants will not make your throat vibrate. Fish, paw, and song have beginning unvoiced consonant sounds.

Your child can listen to and practice voiced and unvoiced beginning consonant sounds through ABCmouse’s variety of activities, including “Ring the Bell.”

Learning Consonant Sounds with ABCmouse

Learning consonants with ABCmouse can be engaging for children—a variety of games, songs, puzzles, and activities allow many opportunities for practice with consonant sounds.

Repetitive practice and repeated exposure is aimed at allowing children to develop automaticity, or the ability to automatically recognize words while reading.

There are many fun activities for learning consonant sounds featured in the ABCmouse curriculum, including the following: • Word Search Games • Spelling Cutout Puzzles • First Letter in Line • Ring the Bell • Alphabet Sounds on the Farm

Do you want to know more about creating an amazing learning experience for your child with ABCmouse’s reading program for kids? Visit ABCmouse.com now!

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» Sounds and letters

Learning the building blocks of words - sounds, their spellings, and word parts

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If you want to store a large, complex system such as the English spelling system in a finite human brain, you have to organise it well.

To organise something, you first need an organising principle or principles.

If you want to use the relationship between letters and sounds as your organising principle for spelling (and most sensible people do), you can start from the letters and work to the sounds, or start from the sounds and work to the letters.

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, but English also has a whole stack of letter combinations that can represent individual sounds:

• Two letter combinations, like “oo” as in “book”, “er” as in “her”, “ph” as in “phone” and “ey” as in “key”
• Three letter combinations, like “igh” as in “high”, “dge” as in “bridge”, “tch” as in “catch” and “ere” as in “here”.
• Four letter combinations, like “eigh” as in “eight”, “aigh” as in “straight”, “augh” as in “caught”, and “ough” as in “bought”, “drought”, “dough”, “through”, “thorough” (but not “cough” or “tough”, where the “ou” and the “gh” represent different sounds, and just happen to be next to each other).

To add to the complexity, many letters and letter combinations can represent more than one sound, for example, the letter “y” represents four different sounds in the words “yes”, “by”, “baby” and “gym”. The spelling “ea” represents three different sounds in the words “beach”, “dead” and “break”.

As well as more common letter-sound patterns, there are letter-sound patterns that only occur in one or two words, like the “sth” in “asthma” and “isthmus”, and the “xe” in “axe”, “deluxe” and “annexe”.

It's an almost impossible task to use letters and letter patterns to organise your thinking about spelling, as there are simply so many of them and their relationships with sounds are so complex.

After a while it starts to seem that there must be thousands of sounds in English, whereas there are only 44[1] . So let's try using sounds as our organising principle.

The sounds of English are:

Three pairs of consonants made by stopping airflow in the mouth then letting it go:

• “p” as in pop, puppy and cantaloupe (voiceless lip sound).
• “b” as in bob, rubber, build and cupboard (voiced lip sound).
• “t” as in tot, butter, backed, joked, laundrette, torte, Thomas, receipt, debt, yacht, indict and pizza (voiceless tongue tip sound).
• “d” as in did, muddy, wagged, aide and jodhpurs (voiced tongue tip sound).
• “k” as in cot, king, luck, quit, chrome, mosque, khaki, liquor, accord, excel, Bourke, trekking, acquaint, racquet and zucchini (voiceless back of the tongue sound).
• “g” as in go, biggest, guide, ghoul and morgue (voiced back of the tongue sound).

Three pairs of consonants made through your nose using your voice:

• “m” as in mum, hammer, limb, autumn, programme and paradigm (lip sound).
• “n” as in non, runner, know, reign, cayenne, pneumonia and mnemonic (tongue tip sound).
• “ng” as in wing, think and tongue (back of the tongue sound).

Four pairs of friction sounds made by squeezing air through narrow spaces in the mouth:

• “th” as in thin, Matthew and phthalates (voiceless tongue-between-teeth sound).
• “th” as in this and breathe  (voiced tongue-between-teeth sound).
• “f” as in far, sniff, phone, cough, Chekhov, gaffe, carafe and often[2] (voiceless teeth on lip sound).
• “v” as in vat, love, skivvy, of, Stephen and Louvre (voiced teeth on lip sound).
• “s” as in sell, city, voice, house, scent, pass, whistle, psychologist, quartz, coalesce, mousse, sword, asthma, and waltz.
• “z” as in zip, is, pause, dazzling, bronze, xylophone, dessert, business and tsar/czar.
• “sh” as in ash, lotion, passion, pension, facial, chef, schnitzel, moustache, ocean, sugar, appreciate, initiate, conscience, tissue, cushion, crescendo and fuchsia.
• “zh” as in beige, vision, pleasure, aubergine, déjà vu, seizure, equation and casuarina.

One pair of sounds made by stopping the air and then releasing it through a narrow space in the mouth:

• “ch” (a combination of “t” and “sh”) as in chair, hutch, creature, bocconcini, cappuccino, kitsch, luncheon, question, righteous, ciao and Czech.
• “j” (a combination of “d” and “zh”) as in jar, gem, sponge, ridge, budgie, religion, adjust, suggest, educate, soldier and hajj.

Four semi-vowels:

• “w” as in we, when, quack, one, marijuana and ouija.
• “y” as in yum, onion, hallelujah, tortilla and El Niño.
• “r” as in rip, wrist, barrel, rhubarb, diarrhoea and Warwick.
• “l” as in look, doll, grille, aisle, island and kohl.

One friction sound that has no pair:

• “h”, made by squeezing air through the back of your throat, as in hat, who, jojoba and junta.

So that makes 24 consonant sounds. Then there are 20 vowels:

Six “checked” vowels that require a consonant sound after them in English (sometimes called "short" vowels):

• “a” as in at, plait, salmon, meringue and Fahrenheit.
• “e” as in wet, deaf, any, said, says, friend, haemmorhage, leopard, leisure, bury and Geoff.
• “i” as in in, myth, passage, pretty, breeches, busy, marriage, sieve, women and bream.
• “o” as in on, swan, because, entree, cough, John, lingerie and bureaucracy.
• “u” as in up, front, young, blood, does and laksa.
• “oo” as in pull, good, could, wolf, tour and Worcestershire.

Six other vowels that are sometimes called “long vowels” (they're not really long, but they can be the last sound in a word):

• “ay” as in same, sail, say, danger, weigh, vein, they, café, reggae, great, purée, fete, straight, gauge, gaol, laissez-faire and lingerie.
• “I” as in like, hi, by, pie, high, type, chai, feisty, bye, height, kayak, eye, iron, maestro and naive.
• “oh” as in rope, no, boat, goes, glow, plateau, soul, mauve, though, yolk, brooch, owe, sew and Renault.
• “ooh” as in food, June, chew, brutal, youth, clue, fruit, to, sleuth, shoe, roux, coup, pooh, through, two, manoeuvre and bouillion.
• “you” (a combination of “y” and “ooh”) as in use, few, cue, feud, tulip, beauty, pursuit, ewe and vacuum.
• “ee” as in bee, eat, field, me, these, jelly, taxi, turkey, ceiling, marine, paediatric, amoeba, quay, people, Grand Prix, fjord, ratatouille and Leigh.

Seven other vowels, some of which are called "r-controlled" vowels in some spelling books:

• “ar” as in arm, past, calf, blah, charred, are, baa, clerk, aunt, heart, bazaar and bizarre.
• “er” as in fern, curl, dirt, word, pearl, purr, err, whirred, slurred, masseur, journalist, milieu, were, colonel, myrrh, myrtle and hors d’oeuvre.
• “aw” as in saw, cord, more, court, faun, bought, wart, all, door, chalk, taught, board, dinosaur, baulk, sure, broad, awesome, you’re, corps, extraordinaire, hors d’oeuvre and assurance.
• “ou” as in out, cow, drought, kauri, Maori and miaow.
• “oy” as in boy, soil, Freud, lawyer and Despoja.
• “air” as in care, fair, pear, parent, aerial, solitaire, there, sombrero, heir, their, they’re, prayer, mayor and yeah.
• “ear” as in dear, beer, tier, ere, bacteria, souvenir, Hampshire, weird and Shakespeare.

One unstressed vowel, heard mostly in multisyllable words:

• “uh” as in fire, super, metre, buzzard, tractor, odour, jealous, nature, mynah, violent, pencil, cherub, delicate, granite, purpose, minute, restaurant, aesthetic, martyr, mischievous, borough, portrait, foreign, papier-mache, cupboard, sulphur, porpoise, circuit, tapir…

The unstressed vowel also occurs in spoken sentences in small, grammatical words like "a" and "the". Because these words occur very frequently, this can be a source of much confusion about how basic vowels are spelt.

This is still a long list, but at least it's possible to put a lid on it, by teaching the main spellings for all the sounds in one-syllable words, then the main additional spellings in longer words.

Eventually you find you've got most words covered, and there's just a list of weird ones for each sound that don't follow any major pattern, and are therefore also memorable.

Learners can make up a spelling collection with a page for each sound, and list all the spellings they know in groups. In fact there are books you can buy for this purpose such as Soundasaurus, but I generally quibble with some of the categories, and prefer to use my own Spelling Collection. Crossings-out, sticky notes and/or extra pages added in later are good evidence that learners have been actively thinking and learning about the relationship between sounds and letters.

[1] Linguists will always argue about how many sounds there are in English, because the mouth is a mushy place without clear boundaries – for example, the “l” sound at the start of “look” is phonetically different from the one at the end of “hall”, and the sound “ay” in “play” and “ie” as in “time” are technically two sounds, but slicing things that finely doesn’t really help with learning spelling. Most people say there are between 42 and 44 sounds for the purposes of teaching spelling (depending on whether you call "ear" and "air" separate spellings or not).

[2] and lieutenant if you speak British English, but actually this word comes from French and means someone standing in (in lieu) for the tenant or office-holder, so the American pronunciation (“loo-tenant”, not “leff-tenant”) is closer to the original French.

« Spelling rules

Vowel sounds and letters. How many are there in Russian?

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The correct pronunciation of words is one of the components of beautiful and literate speech. To achieve this, you will first have to study the sounds themselves. In this article, we will figure out together what vowel sounds are, how many vowels are in the alphabet of the Russian language, and what sounds they can represent.

What are vowels and sounds

Vowel sounds are those sounds that we freely convey with our voice. Hence their name comes from: voice means "voice". When pronouncing, air exits through the mouth and does not create noise, and the position of the tongue and lips determines which vowel sound we will pronounce.

There are much fewer vowels in Russian than consonants. There are 6 of them in total: [a], [o], [i], [s], [y] and [e]. To understand whether a vowel sound is in front of you or not, try to sing it. For example:

• a-a-a ,

• y-y-y

• ss .

If it works, then the sound is a vowel. You can't do that with consonants.

There are more vowels than sounds - there are 10 of them: a, i, u, u, o, e, e, e, i, s . This difference is due to the fact that some of these letters can represent two sounds and are pronounced using a combination of a vowel and a consonant [y']. For example, in word spruce the letter e expresses two sounds - [y'] and [e]. Let's look at the table all the vowel sounds and the letters that represent them.

Demo lesson in Russian

Take the test at the introductory lesson and find out what topics separate you from the "five" in Russian.

How vowel sounds are related to syllables

Vowel sounds form syllables - sound segments of words that we pronounce with one breath. One syllable can be either a vowel with one or more consonants, or a vowel alone. There is even a rule by which syllables can be counted: how many vowels in a word - so many syllables. nine0003

For example, in the word journey there are 5 vowels: [u], [i], [e], [i] and [e]. This means that it has 5 syllables: p-te-she-stvi-e .

Test yourself!

Count the number of syllables in the words: try on, tanner, well-groomed, care, prefix, capital, wet, invitation, orange .

Vowel sounds and stress

Now let's see what groups vowel sounds are divided into. Sometimes their pronunciation depends on whether the stress falls on them, that is, whether we single them out with our voice. So vowel sounds are divided into stressed and unstressed. Here are some examples:

Stress in Russian can fall on any of the existing vowel sounds. However, only 4 of them can be unstressed - these are [a], [i], [y] and [s]. In this position, we pronounce sounds weaker than under stress, because of which they can change qualities and sound differently.

Interestingly, the vowels [o] and [e] can only be stressed. There are only a couple of exceptions to this rule: for example, in words cocoa and canoe sounds [o] and [e] in an unstressed position.

How unstressed vowels are related to consonants

How an unstressed vowel sounds depends on the consonant that precedes it. Or rather, from its hardness or softness. If it is a hard consonant, it can be followed by unstressed vowels [y], [a] and [s]. When we talk about a soft consonant, it is followed by unstressed vowels [u] and [i].

Test yourself

It's time to find out if you now understand well what vowel sounds are in Russian. To do this, we have prepared tasks for self-examination. nine0003

Task 1

List all the vowels in these words:

• fair,

• rejoice,

• doll,

• distant,

• buddy,

• voting,

• mirror,

• story,

• OK,

• captivate.

Task 2

Name 5 words each in which the sounds [a], [i], [y] and [s] would be stressed.

Task 3

Name 5 words in which an unstressed vowel would come after a hard consonant, and 5 more words where it would follow a soft consonant.

Task 4

Count the number of syllables in the words below (don't forget to use the rule you learned at the beginning of the article!):

• weightless,

• sunrise,

• adventure,

• painter,

• perpetuate,

• pleasant,

• image,

• category,

• exciting,

• melting,

• snowflake.

The rules of phonetics help us to speak correctly, so it is important to master the topic of vowels well and avoid gaps in knowledge. If even after reading the article you still have questions on the topic, you can figure them out in the Russian language course at Skysmart. In online lessons, the teacher will help the student work out the theory and consolidate the result on non-boring tasks. So the student will be able to improve the quality of knowledge, and fall in love with the subject. nine0003

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All Rules in Russian at hand

Alena Fedotova

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Consonant and vowel letters - the alphabet of the Russian language

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In linguistics there are concepts of "sound" and "letter". This article presents the table "Consonants and vowels", as well as tables that display which sounds represent certain letters. nine0003

Vowels and consonants

There are 33 letters in Russian: 10 vowels, 21 consonants, as well as ъ and ь. Separately vowels and separately consonants will be demonstrated by the table of consonants and vowels below:

Vowels	Consonants
a, e, yo, i, o, u, s, u, u, i	b, c, d, e, g, h, d, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, f, x, c, h, w, w

There are fewer letters in Russian than sounds: there are 33 letters and 42 sounds.

Vowel sounds and letters

The vowels of the Russian alphabet represent only 6 sounds:

Sounds	Letters
[a]	a, i
[e]	e, e
[o]	o, yo
[and]	and
[y]	y, y
[s]	s

As can be seen from the table, the sounds [and], [s] are indicated by the letters and, s, the remaining sounds are indicated by two letters at once. Hence there is a discrepancy between the number of vowels and sounds. nine0003

The letters e, e, u, i, located after the consonants, indicate the softness of the consonant. A consonant is soft, not a vowel, so it is incorrect to pronounce the following phrases: “soft vowels” or “hard vowels”. The vowels are not soft or hard, they can only indicate softness.

Consonants and letters

All consonants, of which there are 21, represent 36 sounds. All letters and sounds are displayed in the following table:

nine0611

[x], [x’]

Letters	Sounds
b	[b], [b’]
to	[in], [in’]
g	[g], [g’]
d	[d], [d']
w	nine0002 [f]
s	[h], [h’]
and	[y']
to	[k], [k']
l	[l], [l’]
m	[m], [m’]
n	nine0002 [n], [n’]
p	[n], [n’]
r	[r], [r']
from	[s], [s’]
t	[t], [t’]
f	[f], [f’]
x
c	[c]
h	[h']
sh	[w]
w	[w']

As can be seen from the table, the letters zh, ts and sh denote only hard consonants, the letters y, h, u only denote soft consonants, and the remaining 15 letters can denote both soft and hard consonants.

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