Ever wonder what those strange symbols are that appear next to words in the dictionary?
They are a guide to pronounciation called Phonetics. Those symbols represent sounds, of which there are roughly 44 in the English language. Since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, 44 characters are used to represent them all. Phonics should be a part of every student's tools for learning a language.
Often children learn to pronounce words by imitating the teacher. They can't work out the letter sounds for themselves. Phonics is a relatively simple way for people learning a language to sound out words for themselves. If you know this system you can pronounce any English word perfectly without a teacher by looking in a learner's dictionary.
There are 24 consonant sounds, and 20 vowels sounds. Let us start with vowels - i:
i: is a long vowel sound, shown by the : symbol after the letter. It sounds like:
sea /si:/
me /mi:/
free /fri:/
In other news, check this article out. http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=26618
1 comments:
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