/h/

The letter “H” is a lot more complicated than you may think. The best thing for ESL learners to do is to listen to how people where you are living say this letter, and do the same.

/h/ is made by pushing air through the mouth quickly enough to make a sound of rushing air. This sound is called aspiration. The verb is to aspirate. /h/ is unvoiced. Most English words that start with the letter H are aspirated; for example: hello. I don’t start with the E; I don’t say ‘ello I say hello. When H – and I’m talking about the letter, not the sound – when H appears in the middle or end of an English word the H is almost always part of a digraph, which is two letters that make one sound, such as mechanic, author, ditch, or mouth. Let’s take a look at some examples of /h/ at the beginning of the word: hello, hate, who, hear, house. Let’s take a look at some example sentences: Helen has a whole heap of hooks. He hurt himself hilariously. He hung his hat on the hook in the hall. If you’d like some more practice, look below here are some words that start with a silent H: hour, honest, honor, and in some dialects, herb. In other dialects, we would say herb.