Branches of linguistics, phonetics and speech sounds

Speech sounds are spoken and heard, while letters are written and seen. A letter is the written sign of a sound. In our language the number of sounds and letters is not always equal. For example, the letter combinations sh, ch, ng express one sound: the word «shahar» (city) has six letters but five sounds (sh, a, h, a, r). O‘ and g‘ are single letters, not two. So when counting sounds in a word, rely on the heard sound, not on the letters.