The Alphabet
Before you can read a word, before you can write a sentence, before you can do anything with written language, you need to know the alphabet. Not just the song — the letters themselves, what they look like, and the fact that they are the building blocks of every word in English.
What an alphabet actually is
Writing is a technology. Before it existed, knowledge could only travel as far as a person's voice could carry, or as far as memory could hold. Writing solved that problem: it made it possible to preserve language and send it across distance and time. The alphabet is the specific technology English uses to do this.
An alphabet is a set of symbols — letters — where each symbol represents a sound. English uses 26 letters. Those 26 letters, combined in different orders, can spell every word in the language. About 170,000 words are in current use. All of them are built from 26 letters. That is the power of an alphabet over other writing systems: a small, learnable set of symbols unlocks the whole language.
The 26 letters
Every letter has two forms: uppercase (capital) and lowercase (small). Uppercase letters are used at the start of sentences, for proper names, and for a few other specific purposes. Lowercase is used everywhere else. The letter is the same letter in both forms — just written differently.
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
The letters are divided into two groups: vowels and consonants. The vowels are A, E, I, O, U. Every other letter is a consonant. This distinction matters because almost every English syllable needs at least one vowel — vowels are the sound that carries a syllable, the consonants shape around it.
Why the order matters
The alphabetical order — A, B, C, D and so on — is arbitrary. There is no particular reason B comes before C. The order was set thousands of years ago and kept because it is useful: alphabetical order is how dictionaries are organised, how indexes work, how filing systems work, how search results are sorted. Knowing the order is not about the letters themselves — it is about being able to navigate any list sorted by it.
A useful exercise: without singing the song, write the alphabet out from memory. Then check. Any letter you hesitate on is one to practise. Most people hesitate around the same few letters — the run from L through Q tends to be where confidence drops.
Printed and handwritten letters
The letters you see on a printed page or a screen look slightly different from the letters you write by hand. Both are the same letters. You will encounter both throughout your life — reading is mostly printed, writing is often by hand. It is worth being comfortable with both forms.
Some letters look almost identical in print and handwriting — S, O, X. Others look quite different — printed lowercase a has a closed top, handwritten a is usually open. Printed lowercase g has a tail that loops; handwritten g is often simpler. Neither is wrong. Both are that letter.
What knowing the alphabet unlocks
The alphabet is not the end of learning to read. It is the beginning. Knowing the letters is the first step; the next step is connecting letters to sounds, then combining sounds into words. But without this first step, nothing that follows makes sense. Every chapter in this course builds on the assumption that you know these 26 letters and can recognise them in any order, in uppercase and lowercase, in print and in hand.
A question you can now answer: if you look up a word in a dictionary, and the word starts with M, you know exactly where to open the book — roughly in the middle, because M is the 13th of 26 letters.