I think you are both right but are talking about different things. In elementary school in Canada, I was taught phonetics to help learn sounding words out. Thi

I think you are both right but are talking about different things. In elementary school in Canada, I was taught phonetics to help learn sounding words out. This was absolutely a government-sanctioned curriculum. I was taught that the sounds are categorized as either consonants or vowels. Every English speaker can confirm that of course this is correct. But then you major in linguistics and discover that the elementary school definition of consonants and vowels is actually not quite right. And you can’t even categorize certain sounds well (such as the “w” in “we”, which is actually pronounced with a mostly open vocal tract).