Phonology

When considering English phonology, you are most likely to be concerned with the following:


 * phonemes - mostly dealing with vowel sounds and consonant sounds, not necessarily the letters as they are written e.g. 'throw' has 3 phonemes but 5 letters.
 * syllables
 * lexical stress
 * prosody
 * stress
 * rhythm
 * intonation
 * variations of pronunciation such as accent

Learners of English may have very different problems with phonology depending on their level and their first language (L1). Also, unlike some languages e.g. Russian, there is no standard pronunciation, though there have been attempts in various English speaking countries to create one. You can find a good repository of English varieties at the dialects archive.

Phonemes
There are around 44 separate sounds or phonemes in English. You can find practice of many of these on the BBC website or this Tools for Clear Speech website.