Ido has the exact same alphabet as English, and conveniently, almost every letter is pronounced in the exact same way. There are, however, a few which differ, so I'll go over those here.
A - A is always pronounced like it would be in the English word "father".
E - E is always pronounced approximately like the EI in "vein".
I - I is always pronounced as the EE in seen.
O - O is always pronounced approximately like it would be in the English word "go".
U - U is always pronounced like it would be in the English word "rule".
There also happen to be two diphthongs in Ido. A diphthong is when vowels combine to make different sounds, and while they can make learning a language cumbersome, Ido is fortunate to only have two.
AU - AU is always pronounced like it would be in the English word "owl".
EU - EU is always pronounced like a combination of the two letters individually but pronounced as one.
A few consonants also differ from their English counterpart.
C - C is pronounced like the ZZ in "pizza". It can be approximating to look like "ts".
G - G is always hard, like in "get", and will never make a soft J sound.
H - H is never silent as it is in words like "hour".
J - J is a softer sound, like the s in "measure".
R - R is tapped or trilled, like it would sound in Spanish. This is a difficult sound for English speakers, so if you struggle, don't worry in the beginning. The best way to visualize this sound is that it is the same as the TT in butter, where your tongue briefly taps the roof of your mouth.
S - S is always a soft sound, like in the words "soft" and "sound". It will never make a Z sound like it does in "comes".
X - X is always as it is in "expert", and never like it is in "xylophone". This means even at the beginning of a word, it still makes the KS sound.
SH, CH, and QU are all pronounced as they are in English.
The most important thing to remember is that unlike in most natural languages, letters never change their pronunciation. They are always pronounced, rather than sometimes being silent, and they are always pronounced in one way. This makes the language ten times easier to learn, as pronunciation can be mastered almost immediately.
Stress is the syllable of a word which is focused on. When you pronounce "watermelon", you stress the first syllable, "WA-ter-mel-on". The word "biology" has the stress on the second syllable, "bi-O-lo-gy". In, English there is no rhyme or reason to stress, but Ido has two very strict rules for it.
Most words are stressed on the second to last syllable, assuming it has more than one. For instance, the Ido word "libro" ("book") is pronounced "LI-bro". However, verbs have a form known as the infinitive. (This exists in English too. "run", "runs", etc. are all derived from the infinitive "to run".) In Ido, the infinitive always ends with -ar, such as the word "lamentar" (to lament). When the verb ends with this -ar, the stress is on the final syllable. "la-ment-AR". We'll go over how verbs change later on, so don't worry about them too much yet, but do know that once they change out of this infinitive, the stress follows the first rule.
One last rule to remember is that when the final vowel of a word is preceded by I or U, those two vowels are treated as one syllable. In the words "studias" and "linguo", the IA and the UO are considered one syllable. As such, the stress falls on what is now the second to last syllable, "STUD-ias", "LING-uo". They would never be pronounced "stud-I-as", "ling-U-o", even if in English those would be considered the second to last sylllables.
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