The International Phonetic Alphabet is a standardized system of recording the pronunciation of words.
I’m curious how many people have bothered learning IPA. For those of you who have, what was your reason to learn? How long did it take? What method did you use to learn and how fluent would you consider yourself in IPA?
Nope, can’t read it. I’m sufficiently interested in words and linguistics that if I had enough free time, I would probably learn just for fun. But it’s probably on page 17 of my bucket list, so I doubt I ever will.
I learned it in high school 45 years ago. I don’t remember doing anything special to learn it. It’s pretty straightforward. 3/4 of the letters have the same value as they commonly do in English. Occasionally I’ll forget one of the vowels that doesn’t appear in my dialect and have to look it up. I can’t imagine why anyone who has the slightest interest in language wouldn’t learn IPA; it’s really the only way to understand the pronunciation of a word without hearing it.
BTW, I don’t think “fluent” is a good word to describe someone who knows IPA well. You almost never read a continuous passage of text written in IPA. You’re almost always just interpreting a single word or two in isolation.
I was surprised, on my first trip to Japan 20 years ago, to see it used on some shop signs. Fancy ones, that otherwise would have used English words. As if the Japanese needed a fourth writing system!
Might have been a 1990s fad; I haven’t noticed the phenomenon on more recent visits.
Nope, can’t read it. Never had any reason to learn it.
Never even heard of it. I opened the thread thinking it was about beer or else the A as in Alpha phonetic alphabet
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Nope, and never intend to learn. It annoys me when people bring out the stupid symbols rather than using standard letters to emphasise the difference they’re talking about.
I could in college (for all the sounds in English anyway; we learned the basics in Linguistics 101). Today, probably not
Know of it, and it is complete gobbledy-gook to me.
I recall having a disagreement on this board a little while ago with someone who insisted that it is worth the time to learn IPA. I disagreed. Pretty much the only place I see it used it Wikipedia, so it isn’t like I have an interest in learning the system just for one website.
There have been many threads where miscommunication and misunderstanding could have been avoided, and much time and aggravation saved, because a sound was being “obviously” (to one poster) represented by a “standard letter,” yet interpreted as a different sound by someone else. (Especially, but not only, when a sound in question is not part of one of the poster’s phonemic inventory, or is “hidden” as an allophone for him/her).
I’m not advocating IPA as always the best solution for this — often, as you suggest, using “standard letters” will suffice — but sometimes it can be a helpful tool, if at least some of the thread participants have some familiarity with it.
Linking to an audio sample of a sound is easy these days, so maybe that’s the better solution, in many cases. But finding the right link quickly is easier if you know some IPA.
Never hoid of it!
IPA, PBR, MGD. I read them all as long as the labels haven’t peeled off in the tub of ice.
I picked “fluent” but I agree “fluent” is perhaps not the best word for it. I find it helpful in threads discussing pronunciation absent audio samples. It’s like how knowing the names of notes or intervals or chords (or having sheet music) helps when discussing the details of how a musical part sounds absent a handy instrument or audio samples.
I initially encountered it in college about 25 years ago in a linguistics class, forgot about it, and then when learning foreign languages, came across it again and again. It was immensely helpful in this regard and avoided a lot of confusion I had with pronunciation charts that assumed certain accents (the example I’ve brought up before was my book on Hungarian, explaining that köszönöm is pronounced KER-ser-nerm, when I knew sure as hell from listening to people that there was no “r” in the sound. I only figured out much later that it was published in the UK and assumed a non-rhotic accent. Some other aspects of the book also did not line up with my Great Lakes accent, so the book was next-to-useless to me for figuring out how Hungarian is pronounced.)
Anyhow, in pronunciation threads, I include both IPA and “standard letters,” but it gets to be frustrating when, for one example, maybe half your audience pronounces “aw” and “ah” the same, and you have to spend another sentence or two explaining how they differ (in my accent “Dawn” and “Don” are different vowels.)
IPA is perhaps a bit more useful if you are multilingual and/or have experience with various accents, so you already have an inventory of sounds that goes beyond your own dialect. But it is damned useful for me, and especially so learning how a foreign word is supposed to be pronounced when I don’t have access to a native speaker or an audio sample (and, heck, even with the audio sample, it’s sometimes easier for me to figure out what’s going on by also seeing the IPA.)
This. I pronounce words the way I think they are/should be pronounced.
Never learned IPA.
Most online dictionaries offer a sound clip for pronouncing the word. That’s more accurate imho than deciphering IPA.
Library - offers the standard pronunciation and the slang li-berry many people use.
I took a course in “Voice & Diction” as an undergrad, thinking it would be a course to help me speak more clearly and project my voice more when speaking to an audience. It wasn’t.
IPA was taught and I loved it. I’d grown up with dictionary pronunciation guidelines that had all those annoying diacritical marks and where they’d use one symbol for a sound here and a different symbol for the same sound made in a different context. Example: The a with the two dots over it would be used for that sound but you’d also often encounter an o with a hat over it and it represented the same sound.
The IPA was a fresh approach, with one sound per symbol and one symbol per sound. I don’t know why I adored it but I did. Created my own IPA font and learned to type in it. Later developed a database application that would generate characters + codes that I could paste into different contexts (including vBulletin) and they’d render as IPA:
… wʌz ɛ frɛʃ ǝprotʃ wiθ wʊn saɔnd pɚ sImbǝl pɚ saɔnd
ai dont no hwaI aI ǝdord It bʌt aI dId
Man, I just DO NOT understand sentiments like this. How would you use “standard letters” to, say, demonstrate how a person from London or Liverpool pronounces “bath”? Or how a Dutch speaker pronounces “Amsterdam” or how an Italian speaker pronounces “Venezia”? It’s fine to say you’re totally uninterested in pronunciation, I get that not everyone is into linguistics, but to say that there’s a way to use “standard letters” (as if there’s a standard pronunciation of English) is like saying you want to use words rather than musical notation to tell someone how to play a song on the piano.
What do you do when you want to explain to someone how you pronounce a word? (The only reasonable answers I see are either “use IPA” or “I never do that”.)
All of this.
Several of the reactions I see here and in other discussions about the IPA strike me as anti-knowledge, a kind of know-nothingism, full of anger that people are using knowledge that I have stubbornly refused to acquire. It’s baffling, especially in a forum dedicated to eradicating ignorance.
It rarely comes up IME. When it does, “rhymes with custard, sort of” works fine for me. Then again, I always think Dawn and Don sound absolutely identical.
