Soft c and soft g pronunciation

The letters c and g each have two sounds in English, and the letter that follows decides which one you use — almost always. Before the vowels e, i and y, c is soft (/s/) and g is soft (/dʒ/, the j sound). Before a, o, u and consonants, both are hard: c is /k/ and g is /ɡ/. That is why cat starts with /k/ but city with /s/, and why go begins with /ɡ/ but gentle with /dʒ/. The soft sounds come from French and Latin influence; the hard ones are the older Germanic values.

Hard c — /k/ before a, o, u and consonants:

Soft c — /s/ before e, i, y:

The rule is very reliable for c. The main traps are the handful of words where c is soft before other vowels, like facade (the ç marks it), and words where c is part of a different digraph entirely — church has /tʃ/, not /s/ or /k/, because ch is its own spelling pattern.

Hard g — /ɡ/ before a, o, u and consonants:

Soft g — /dʒ/ before e, i, y:

At the end of a word, the spelling -ge is reliably soft — page , large , change — while dog , bag and leg keep the hard g.

Unlike c, g has a small but very common set of hard-g words before e and i. They are mostly old Germanic words whose vowels changed after the spelling settled:

And inside words, g before e and i stays hard more often than the basic rule suggests: tiger , anger , begin and every -ing form are pronounced with /ɡ/. Pronouncing them with /dʒ/ is a classic learner error. The safest generalisations: g before e/i is soft at the start of a word and in the -ge endings, hard in most other positions.

Italian loanwords ignore English rules entirely — c before i is /tʃ/ and g before e is /dʒ/, as in Italian itself:

cello is "CHEL-oh", ciabatta starts with "chah", gelato with "jeh" and giraffe with "jih". Irish English has the opposite convention — c and g are always hard there, which is why Irish names like Ciaran begin with a k sound; see the Irish names guide for that system.

The soft sounds affect grammar too. Nouns ending in hard c change spelling when suffixed: music becomes musician — the c softens to /ʃ/ before -ian, and the letter's job is to mark the change. The same shift is why electric becomes electricity with a soft c. Pronouncing the hard version in these derivatives ("elec-TRIC-ity" is fine, but the c of electricity is /s/) is one of the most frequent errors in otherwise fluent speech. If you would like more practice on hearing the contrast, the minimal pairs guide explains the method.

Read slowly first. Pronounce each syllable deliberately before trying to blend them at full speed. Rushing hides the vowel and consonant shapes your ear needs to learn.

Record yourself. Most phones have a voice memo app — record a word, then compare it to the playback here. Hearing the gap between your version and the model accent makes targeted practice far easier.

Focus on one accent. Jumping between American, British and Australian in the same session creates confusion. Pick the accent you encounter most and stick with it until the patterns feel natural.

Every word above is a button. Set the accent and voice you want on the main screen, then come back — the guides use whatever you chose. To hear two accents against each other, use Compare; to test whether you can actually hear a contrast, use the listening quiz.