When you have a phonetic language like Spanish, for instance, it is quite easy to say the words you have learned from a book or  a dictionary because if you know the sounds of each letter you can do quite well when speaking the language and everybody will understand you. But this is not the case with English, which for a lot of people seems like a `crazy´language with its own rules. I already mentioned this feature of English in a post on phonetics and here I’m going to mention another feature that will also look pretty strange to many language learners, that is, letters that appear in the written form of language but should not be pronounced. These letters are called ‘silent letters’ because we do not pronounce them. About two years ago I created a slide lesson, but now that I (unfortunately), have a lot of time, I have also made a video where you can see and hear the examples some of the most typical silent letters.

There’s a quiz button at the bottom of this post.