The English alphabet is phonetic—that is, the letters represent sounds. The Chinese alphabet, however, isn't phonetic, since its symbols represent ideas rather than sounds.

The International Phonetic Alphabet chart with sounds lets you listen to each of the sounds from the IPA. The interactive IPA chart can be found at the bottom of this page.

Got an English text and want to see how to pronounce it? This online converter of English text to IPA phonetic transcription will translate your English text into its phonetic (“phonemic” in linguistic terms) …

Phonetics deals with two aspects of human speech: production (the ways humans make sounds) and perception (the way speech is understood). The communicative modality of a language describes the …

Jan 13, 2026 · phonetics, the study of speech sounds and their physiological production and acoustic qualities.

PHONETIC definition: Also phonetical of or relating to speech sounds, their production, or their transcription in written symbols. See examples of phonetic used in a sentence.

Pronunciations are shown in this dictionary using the International Phonetic Alphabet. A spelling system can be described as phonetic if you can understand how words are pronounced simply by looking at …

1. of or pertaining to speech sounds, their production, or their transcription in written symbols. 2. representing speech sounds: phonetic transcription. 3. agreeing with pronunciation: a phonetic spelling.

Feb 3, 2026 · phonetic (plural phonetics) (linguistics) In such writing systems as the Chinese writing system, the portion of a phono-semantic character that provides an indication of its pronunciation; …

May 21, 2025 · Phonetics is the study of how speech sounds are produced, combined, and represented by symbols. The word phonetics comes from Greek for sound, voice. Advances in brain-scanning …