The letters c and g each have two sounds, and the letter after them chooses. Before e, i or y, c is said as s and g as the sound at the start of judge. Anywhere else, c is k and g is the hard sound in go. The table scores both rules. One is perfect and one is not.
Core ideas
Three ideas. The third is the one a student needs most.
A c or a g followed by e, i or y takes its soft sound: s for c, and j for g. Followed by anything else, including a, o, u and a consonant, a letter that is not a, e, i, o or u, it takes its hard sound. You read one letter and you have the answer.
Many words have a c or a g that is not a test of this rule. In chair and back the c is part of a pair of letters. In sign the g is not said. In science the c sits beside an s that could be the source of the sound. The table leaves these out and lists them with the reason, so the score is about the rule and not about other things.
Soft c is right on all 348 words it can be tried on. Soft g is right on 177 of 187. The ten misses are short, common words, and they are the same kind of word every time, so you can learn them as one list.
The material
The table scored 187 words for the g rule, and ten of them break it.
Take two letters and ask what sound each makes. For c the answer is two sounds. It is k in cat and s in city. For g it is also two: the hard sound in go and the sound at the start of gentle.
You have probably been given a rule for this. Before e, i or y, the letter is soft. Anywhere else it is hard. The question for this lesson is a plain one: how often is that right?
Before the page was built, every word of the 2,800 with a c or a g in it was picked out, and the way it is said was read from a dictionary, a book that records how the word is said. The page prints those words, runs the rule on each one, and compares the two. It scores a word only if the c or the g is the one place the sound could come from. A word with two c letters is set aside, because one score cannot say which c made the sound. So is a word where the letter is part of ch, ck, sc, cc, cq or qu, and a word where another letter, s, k, q, x or z, could make the sound instead.
That leaves 348 words with a c that tests the rule, and 400 that were set aside. For g it leaves 187 and sets 143 aside. Open the setting called the words set aside and every one of them is there with its reason.
On the 348 words, the rule is right 348 times, which is 100.0%. Center, certain, face, price and century are said with s. Call, come, cut and cold are said with k. There is no miss to read, and that is a result too: for this list, one letter after the c is all a student needs.
Eight words were set aside because the dictionary gives them both sounds or neither. They are ancient, appreciate, efficient, financial, ocean, official, politician and racial. In seven of them the c is said as sh; for ancient the dictionary's first entry gives the sound at the start of church. That is a different rule, and the last lesson of this course takes up the endings several of them share.
On the 187 words for g, the rule is right 177 times, which is 94.7%. Gentle, giant, age, large and energy follow it. The ten that do not are altogether, begin, forget, give, gear, get, gift, girl, target and together.
Read them again. In every one, the g sits before e or i and is said hard. That is why this list is worth knowing: all ten are common words, and you will use them every day.
The dictionary is American and the table reads only its first entry. A word that has two ways to be said is scored on the first. Nine words were set aside for g because the dictionary gives both sounds or neither, sign and foreign among them. The rule says what the spelling suggests, and the dictionary says what people say.
Interactive
Each rule reads only the letters; the dictionary says what is actually said
Every sound, part count and strong part here is read from the first pronunciation in CMUdict, the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary, which records American speech. Its licence asks that this notice travel with anything made from it:
Copyright (C) 1993-2015 Carnegie Mellon University. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. The contents of this file are deemed to be source code. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. This work was supported in part by funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation of the United States of America, and by member companies of the Carnegie Mellon Sphinx Speech Consortium. We acknowledge the contributions of many volunteers to the expansion and improvement of this dictionary. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY NOR ITS EMPLOYEES BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Method
Four steps, in this order.
Look only at that one letter. If the c or the g is the last letter, there is nothing after it and the hard sound is the answer.
City and cell begin with s. Gentle and giant begin with the sound at the start of judge.
Cat, cold and cup begin with k. Go and good begin with the hard g.
Get, give, girl and seven more keep the hard sound before e or i. There is no such list for c.
Each line reads the letter after the c or the g and gives the sound. The last line is the one that fails.
Get is one of the first words a student meets, and it breaks the rule. So do give, girl, gift, begin, forget, gear, target, together and altogether. In all ten, the g comes before e or i and is said hard. Nothing goes wrong the other way: on the 187 words, a g followed by anything else is never said as j.
You should be able to read the letter after a c or a g, choose the sound, read the score of each rule off the table, say which words were left out of the score and why, and say the ten words where g keeps its hard sound.
Something to change about this lesson? Write it down, tick it off when it is handled, and export the list when you want to act on it. Kept in this browser only: nothing is sent anywhere, and nobody is notified.
No recommendations yet for this lesson.