Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media for learning pronunciations from acoustic sequences. One method includes receiving an acoustic sequence, the acoustic sequence representing an utterance, and the acoustic sequence comprising a sequence of multiple frames of acoustic data at each of a plurality of time steps; stacking one or more frames of acoustic data to generate a sequence of modified frames of acoustic data; processing the sequence of modified frames of acoustic data through an acoustic modeling neural network comprising one or more recurrent neural network (RNN) layers and a final CTC output layer to generate a neural network output, wherein processing the sequence of modified frames of acoustic data comprises: sub sampling the modified frames of acoustic data; and processing each subsampled modified frame of acoustic data through the acoustic modeling neural network.