Phoneme

Phonemes are the units of sound (speech) that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. Most varieties (accents and dialects) of spoken English have about 23 consonantal phonemes and 21 vowel phonemes (altogether 44 phonemes) but only 26 letters in writing. To see all the phonemes in English, the International Phonetic Alphabet has a unique letter for every phoneme, unlike the English alphabet.

A good way to learn phonemes in a language is to learn minimal pairs, which are pairs of different words that are different by only one sound. An example is "bit" and "bat". Even though only the vowel in each word is different, each word has a completely different meaning. Another example is "dip" and "tip" in which both words have different meanings even though only the first consonant in each word is different.