The English alphabet: 26 letters, many sounds

Twenty-six letters for about forty-four sounds. The letters are the easy part; learning which sound each one makes in a word is the work.

English uses the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet, five of them vowels (a e i o u, with y often joining them). Each letter has a name – ay, bee, see – and one or more sounds, and the two are not the same: the letter a is called ay but sounds like a in cat, father, about and cake. That gap between name and sound is why English spelling has to be learned word by word.

Some rules do hold: a silent e at the end of a word usually makes the vowel before it say its name (cap, cape); c before e, i or y sounds like s (city) and otherwise like k (cat); g before e, i or y often sounds like j (gentle); th has two sounds (thin, this); and combinations like sh, ch, ph and ng stand for single sounds. The A0 level of the course teaches the letters, their names, the sounds they make in real words and the spellings that do not follow the rules.

Stroke order matters less in English than in Japanese or Korean, but a consistent order makes writing faster and letters more legible; the chart below shows the standard one for print letters. Tap a letter to see it written and to trace it.

The chart

Tap a character to watch it being written and to trace it yourself.

Letters

  • Learn the letter names first – you will need them to spell your own name aloud – then the most common sound of each.
  • Read words, not letters: cat, cake, car, care. The vowel sound depends on the letters around it.
  • Keep a list of words whose spelling surprised you (enough, island, Wednesday). English is learned by its exceptions.

The lessons that teach it

The A0 level of the course, free: the letters, their sounds and the first words, with the same stroke animations and tracing exercises.

First Letters

Writing and sounding the first half of the English alphabet.

  1. A to F: the first six letters
  2. G to L: six more
  3. M to R: the middle of the alphabet
  4. Checkpoint: A to R
  5. Reading, listening and 10 questions

The Rest of the Alphabet

The last letters, capital letters, and the first words you can read.

  1. S to X: six more letters
  2. Y and Z, and letters that come in pairs
  3. Your first English words
  4. Checkpoint: the whole alphabet
  5. Reading, listening and 10 questions

The whole course: Learn English together

Questions

How many letters and how many sounds does English have?
Twenty-six letters and, depending on the accent, about forty-four sounds. That is why one letter can have several sounds and one sound several spellings.
Is y a vowel or a consonant?
Both. At the start of a word or syllable it is a consonant (yes, beyond); elsewhere it is a vowel sound (my, happy, gym).
Which English spelling does the course teach?
British and American spellings are both shown where they differ (colour/color, centre/center); the exercises accept either.