A.B.C. = All in Beautiful Colours!

Do you sometimes need to say the letters of the alphabet one by one? Maybe you have to spell your name; or your address over the phone. Maybe you want to help a student learning English with you to spell a word correctly.

There are many ways of remembering the sound of each letter - but have you tried grouping them into the different sounds they have in common? Here, I have done it with different colours to help.

Here is the alphabet in the order you usually see it. Each colour is for a different sound. For example, the sound when you pronounce the letter A is similar to the sound of H, J and K. That is why all those letters are red. In the picture at the top are examples of words that have the same sound. For example, "hey", "say" and "weigh" are all similar in sound to the red letters.

Finally, here is a table with all the letters in their colour groups so that you can learn them together if that is easier for you. Why does Z appear twice? The reason is that the green Z is how it is pronounced in British English and the blue Z is how it is pronounced in American English.

Of course, you will need to listen to the sounds to pronounce them correctly and I hope your teacher will be able to help you with that. I also hope to add some audio files with the letters and the words in a later post. Let me know if this has helped you by adding a comment.