Lesson 01: Intro and Homophones

Quick Note

Before I start off with the first lesson, I would like to say that one of my goals is to make all of the material provided on this blog as short and straight-forward as possible by giving simple explanations and avoiding the use of difficult terms and related jargon.

Teach Me the basics of homophones, consonants and vowels

English is Not a Phonetic Language 

Phonetic languages are languages in which there is, for the most part, a direct relationship between the spelling and the sound. Namely, words are spelled they way they sound. In a phonetic language, as soon as you see a word you immediately know how to pronounce it (correctly, that is).

English is a non-phonetic language, which means that we don't pronounce words the same way they are spelled. 

In English, two words can have the same spelling but different pronuciation.

She is the main suspect in her husband's murder.
The police suspect him of drug dealing. 


In the 1st sentence, the word suspect must be stressed on the first syllable, because it is a noun here. In the 2nd sentence, the stress falls on the second syllable, because in this case suspect is used as a verb.

The opposite is possible, too. Two words can differ in spelling but be pronounced the same.

I want to buy this T-shirt.
See you on Monday. Bye!

Homophones

Buy and bye are called homophones. Homophones are words that sound exactly the same, but differ in meaning and most of the times in spelling too.

I said "most of the times" because, for example, rose (the flower) and rose (the past tense of "rise") are homophones that have the same spelling. But in most homophones the spelling is different, as in the following word pairs:

buy - bye
weigh - way
two - too
sun - son
piece - peace
meat - meet
week - weak  

Consonants and Vowels

In speech, words are made of sounds. There are consonant sounds (C) and vowel sounds (V). For instance, cat has three sounds (consonant-vowel-consonant; CVC for short). However, the number of sounds in a word isn't always the same as the number of letters. For example:

In writing, the word night has five letters but its pronounciation consists of only three sounds (first a consonant, then a vowel sound and finally another consonant sound; /naɪt/ written in phonemic symbols).

 

Comic illustrated by Pablo Stanley