English alphabet and pronunciation

About this course

English has 26 letters but about 44 sounds, so one letter can say many things. Even the name of W is a leftover. In the 7th century, people began writing English with the Latin alphabet, which had no letter for the w sound, so scribes wrote two u letters, uu. For some centuries English writers used an old rune called wynn instead. In the 11th century Norman scribes brought back uu as one joined letter, and by about 1300 it had replaced wynn. Printers later gave it sharp points, so it looks like vv, but the name kept the old story: double-u.

The eight units start with the 26 letters and names, then short vowel sounds, where five vowel letters must cover about 20 vowel sounds in British English. Silent e and vowel teams follow: hop becomes hope, and long a, i and o glide, so the o in go slides toward oo. Letter pairs such as th come next. Old English had its own letter for the th sound, called thorn, þ, and when William Caxton set up the first printing press in England in 1476, his type came from the Low Countries, where no language used thorn. That is where old shop signs like Ye Olde Tea Shop come from, since the ye was really the word the. Hard sounds, word stress, sentence rhythm and word endings finish the course. Record the noun is REcord, record the verb is reCORD, and cats ends in s while dogs ends in z. Many tasks compare English with Korean loanwords. Hold your palm before your mouth and say desk, then deseukeu, and count one syllable against three.