Advice for Learning English

English has five vowels - A, E, I, O and U. However, those five vowels can be used to make fifteen different vowel sounds. This causes two problems for students. First, sometimes students can't pronounce all fifteen, so their words sound strange. Second, these fifteen different vowel sounds are spelled in very different ways, so English learners can be confused about how to pronounce words when trying to read, or when looking at a word in a dictionary.

In the list below, you can find one example word for each of the 15 vowel sounds. These words are quite basic, so almost everybody should know how to say them. When you can say each sound clearly, you can start to pronounce other words in the same way. If you're not sure how each word is actually pronounced, you can watch a video about Pronouncing English Vowels, Lesson 1.