Question

How many phonemes do english speakers use to producs words?

Answer 1

Part of what makes English difficult to learn is that each letter in the alphabet can represent more than one sound. Plus, since the alphabet only has 26 letters yet represents 44 sounds, many English phonemes are represented by two or three letters working together to represent one sound.

All English sounds are made up of just 44-46 sounds, Japanese also has around 44 or so basic sounds, depending on how you define "basic". The average human can make over 500 distinct sounds of vowels and consonants

Answer 2

A phoneme (/ˈfoʊniːm/) is one of the units of sound (or gesture in the case of sign languages, see chereme) that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, the sound patterns /θʌm/ (thumb) and /dʌm/ (dumb) are two separate words distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, /θ/, for another phoneme, /d/. (Two words like this that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form what is called a minimal pair). In many other languages these would be interpreted as exactly the same set of phonemes (i.e. /θ/ and /d/ would be considered the same).