Letters vs. sounds: Consonants

An important part of making a change to your speech is knowing which sounds are different in your accent than in American English.  When we think of sounds, we think of the letters we use to spell them, but this can be misleading.  English spelling does not always correspond to pronunciation.  In the word bat, each letter says the sound we associate with that letter:  b = /b/; a = /æ/; t = /t/.  But add a vowel, and you get bait or boat or beat, and the 1:1 letter sound correspondence is gone.  We have 26 letters in our alphabet, but 44 sounds (phonemes).

Here is a chart which shows the sounds, rather than the letters, for the consonants of English.  Examples of words with these sounds are listed for the various spellings.