American English Vowel Sounds

There are two things that make English a difficult language to learn:

1. English has a lot of different sounds.
2. The English spelling system is inconsistent

Because English has so many sounds, there are at least a few English sounds that do not exist in your native language. These sounds are always the hardest to learn because you are not used to hearing and speaking them.

Further, English spelling is inconsistent. If you try to learn English through reading and writing alone, it will always be difficult for you and people will speak too quickly for you.

The most difficult sounds for English learners are the vowel sounds. Even though the English writing system only has five vowel letters – (a, i, u, e, o), there are actually 16 different vowel sounds that you will need to master to speak American English with a good accent!

The Vowels of English

The first step is to learn how to tune your vowels. For this process, you will learn how to adjust your tongue to make the correct vowel sounds.

Before you can “tune” your vowel sounds, you will need to understand what a vowel sound is.

Because English spelling is inconsistent, you never never say for sure what the vowel sound of a word is by reading it.

That’s why we use a modified version of The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).  IPA is much more useful to us as language learners because there is no ambiguity:

• Every sound has ONLY ONE symbol.
• Every symbol has ONLY ONE sound.

Below, I say a handful of the vowel sounds in North American English, along with an audio recording where I say each sound. Don’t worry about learning them for now; you will get A LOT of review as you do this course. For now, just review the sounds.

nɑt…nit…nut…neɪt…noʊt…nɪt…nɛt…næt 
wʊd…dəg…dɔg
baɪ…bɔɪ…baʊ