Vowels

Apart from a, e, i, o and u, y is also a vowel.

I and Y are both vowel and consonant.

Vowels are more difficult too figure out because they all have multiple pronunciation.

Consonants

In English i and y are both vowels and consonants.

Phonemes are sounds.

There are 44 different sounds in the English language. The phoneme is marked with square brackets or slashes. It's what you say, not what you write.

Graphemes are written characters. There are 26 individual letters in the alphabet. To be able to represent 44 sounds, we therefore need multigraphs.

Spellingo is a card game that helps you with pronunciation.

Multigraphs are 2 or more characters that together make one sound. The multigraph ough, for example, can make 6 different sounds. There are 48 of these in English plus those adopted from foreign languages. For example: eau in beautiful from French. German multigraphs are for example: sch (Schule), ch (dich) and ck (Rock).

Digraphs, also called diphthongs, are 2 letters that make one sound. In German, these are e.g.: au, ei, eu, ie.

Digraphs are a subgroup of the multigraphs.

Trigraphs have 3 letters and...

...tetragraphs 4 letters. There are more in other languages, but not in English.

Tri- and tetragraphs are further subgroups of multigraphs.

Blend consonants, also called clusters, are consonants that are not spoken individually but blended. However, the individual letters are still audible. Most of them consist of 2-3 letters.

Sentence structure: the simple sentence in English consists of subject+verb+object.

SVO

This simple sentence structure also applies in the subordinate clause.

S+V+O

The extended simple sentence consists of SVO+place+time.

The time can also be placed in front, if necessary.

An affix is a part of speech to extend a root word. A prefix is put in front, a suffix is added at the end. Affixes are a quick way to expand your vocabulary.

Singular or plural are indications of quantity. Some words only exist in the singular or plural. For example: holidays. But not everything that has a plural in German can be multiplied in English. For example: Information does not have a plural in English.

Umlauts, such as ä, ö, ü, do not exist in the English language.