This paper examines the applicability of some learning techniques to the classification of phonemes. The methods tested were artificial neural nets (ANN), support vector machines (SVM) and Gaussian mixture modeling (GMM). We compare these methods with a traditional hidden Markov phoneme model (HMM), working with the linear prediction-based cepstral coefficient features (LPCC). We also tried to combine the learners with linear/nonlinear and unsupervised/supervised feature space transformation methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), springy discriminant analysis (SDA) and their nonlinear kernel-based counterparts. We found that the discriminative learners can attain the efficiency of HMM, and that after the transformations they can retain the same performance in spite of the severe dimension reduction. The kernel-based transformations brought only marginal improvements compared to their linear counterparts.