3.1 Introduction
3.1 Introduction (Individual sounds)
When you learn a new language, it is important that from the beginning you are aware that spelling and letters are not absolutely linked to pronunciation. Written letters are abstract symbols for different sounds that were originally historically linked to pronunciation.
If you are learning a language that has the same alphabet as your mother tongue, it is even more important that you are aware that letters are not symbols for the same sounds in different languages. So the letter i in English does not have the same pronunciation as it does in Swedish. And the letter y is a symbol for a vowel sound in Swedish for example, while in English it represents a consonant sound. There are also letters in Swedish, q, x, which do not have their own sound, or letters that that have the same sound, e.g. v, w, while other Swedish sounds like /sj/, / tj/ and /ng/ do not have a specific letter for them.
It is therefore important to firstly learn pronunciation by listening to the sounds, and after that learn the written language.
NB: In this material, the Swedish sounds are not written in the IPA alphabet (International Phonetic Alphabet). The sounds are represented by letters of the regular alphabet. Long sounds are represented by repeating the letter three times. Certain sounds are represented by two letters.