English has 26 letters and 44 sounds
The 44 Sounds
of English
Every English word you will ever say is built from these 44 pieces. Tap any symbol to hear it. All 426 clips are my own voice.
Start here
Before the phonetics — where are you actually?
Thirty questions across grammar, listening, pronunciation and writing. Ten minutes. You get a level, a score for each skill, and the one thing costing you the most. The listening is my own voice, not a robot.
Take the free test → No signup to take it · all four skills at onceStart here. Two words, five seconds.
Tap each one. That is my voice, not a synthetic one.
Heard the difference? Most people cannot, at first. This is the difference between people understanding you and people pretending to.
Step 1
Find out where you are
The free test. Four skills, one level, and the weak spot you did not know about.
Take the test →Step 2 — you are here
Learn the sounds
All 44 of them, mapped and spoken. Tap anything to hear it and see how the mouth makes it.
Free · open to everyoneStep 3
Train your ear
The Drill Room. Fourteen sessions on the pairs your ear keeps merging.
Open the Drill Room →12 pure vowels
Laid out the way they sit in your mouth — high or low, front or back. Sounds close together here are the ones that get confused.
On a wider screen these sit in a mouth-shaped map. Tap any symbol to hear it.
8 diphthongs
Two vowels inside one syllable. The mouth has to move — holding one pure vowel is the single most common giveaway.
Not sure where to start? The free test scores all four skills and tells you which one is actually holding you back.
Take the free test →24 consonants
Organised by where the sound happens (across) and how the air behaves (down). Pairs sitting side by side are made in exactly the same place — only the voice changes.
If you only do one thing here
Take the assessment
Ten minutes, all four skills, and a straight answer about where your English actually is. Then you will know whether to start with the sounds or somewhere else entirely.
Take the free test → No signup Take it first, decide afterwards.Why this sounds different
Every sound on this page is a real mouth
Most pronunciation tools run on text-to-speech. That is a problem nobody mentions: a synthetic voice is generated from text, so it does not actually make the distinctions you are trying to learn. Ask one for “think” and “sink” and it will often hand you two versions of the same sound.
So I recorded all 426 clips myself — every symbol, every example word, every minimal pair, every practice sentence. When you hear /θ/ here, you are hearing a tongue between actual teeth. That is the only way the training works.
Who made this
I’m Sal. I’m American, I live in Italy, and I help you master English and speak with clarity and confidence. I teach professionals who speak good English but freeze the moment they have to say it out loud in a meeting.
Every clip on this page is my own voice, not a synthetic one — because you cannot train your ear on a robot.
The English Pronunciation Lab — free
Free to join. These two pages train your ear; the Lab is where you train your mouth — with other people, and with me in there answering.
- Live sessions and feedback on your actual speaking
- The full phonetics course as it’s released
- A room full of people working on the same thing