A big part of early school is learning to say the alphabet. How smart do we do it? Not at all.
Here we show a super simple smart way to say the alphabet.
It’s important to teach two pieces: vowels and consonants.
Vowels
So let’s say the vowel alphabet first. We always taught that the letter U is said like the word YOU. You may have noticed that the pronunciation of YOU is not a smart guide to the letter U. When you say the word BUD, you don’t say B-YOU-D. This nonsense is present throughout the alphabet. Let’s get started with the smart way to say the vowel alphabet AEIOU. There are just 5 very simple sounds on which all pronunciations are built
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- PA as in pot or father
(Don’t worry if your dialect, Boston or many others is a little different, it all falls together nicely. And note CRESS flexibility will allow you your own conventions and convert automatically in later advanced versions!)
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- PI as in pit.
- PE as in pet.
- PU as in put
- PO as in pore, what you say just before the R
All you have to say is PA PI PE PU PO using these pronunciations. You can even say PA as in pot, etc., if you like.
You can even substitute another consonant in place of the P, what matters are teh vowels.
SA as in sought or father
SI as in sit.
SE as in set.
SU as in soot
SO as in sore, what you say just before the R
You can say SA SI SE SU SO using these pronunciations.
That’s it, the whole vowel alphabet leading leading later to all sounds you say. We won’t spell them out here, but just give one example to show how simple it all is. Say the word sit with a very long vowel. Now say it long again, but put your hand under your jaw and push the jaw up. You will hear the word seat from tongue raising during sit. We write that vowel as i plus up arrow ^ = i^. This shows that you just raise the tongue higher to get seat. The same isimple dea applies to the 3 arrows used in CRESS.
Consonants
The consonant alphabet is just as simple.
First, we don’t need the letters C, J, Q or X, so the alphabet is already reduced from 26 to 21 letters including the vowels.
Also, just as with vowels, we won’t need combinations such as TH, SH, but will still represent the sounds.
Here is the consonant alphabet, illustrated with the A sound. The “uh” (a^) sound is also an option.
- Ba as in bog
- Da as in dog
- Fa as in fog
- Ga as in goggle
- Ha as in hog
- Ka as in cog
- La as in log
- Ma as in mop
- Na as in not
- Pa as in pot
- Ra as in rot
- Sa as in sought
- Ta as in taught
- Va as in vest
- Wa as in West
- Ya as in yes
- Za as in zest
You can just say BA DA FA GA HA KA LA MA NA PA RA SA TA VA WA YA ZA.
Or clever folks can make a ditty or tune.
It’s as simple as that. We won’t go over the use of arrows here, but point out the simplicity. Say the first S sound in sit stretched out very long so you can hear the S by itself. Now repeat, stretching it out again, but consciously force your tongue forward until you feel it between your upper and lower teeth. You see the logic of writing the TH sound simply as an S with the arrow < pointing to the front.