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Why don’t more dictionaries use IPA?

 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room Post Reply
30 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3
Medulin
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Croatia
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Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali

 
 Message 25 of 30
15 April 2014 at 2:45am | IP Logged 
US-made dictionaries don't use IPA but respellings,
it seems native speakers like respellings better ;)


French-English, French-German dictionaries use IPA symbols,
but their phonological approach is very different from the
actual Parisien pronunciation (phonetic values of sounds) of today.

I don't see purpose of phonology-based IPA.

If actual phonetic values are not important, then, for many languages there are better alternatives to IPA symbols (Pinyin phonological system of Mandarin, and Kana of Japanese).

Portuguese and Italian don't really need IPA symbols in dictionaries,
all you need to know whether stressed o and e's are close or open,
and all native dictionaries of Italian and Portuguese show them like this:

stélla or stella (é)
estrela (ê)

Edited by Medulin on 15 April 2014 at 3:04am

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Ganzpret
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United States
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Studies: Ancient Egyptian

 
 Message 26 of 30
18 June 2014 at 4:35am | IP Logged 
Too many stupid people in the world, there's your answer.

Edited by Ganzpret on 18 June 2014 at 4:39am

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Tollpatchig
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Studies: German, Maltese

 
 Message 27 of 30
26 September 2014 at 6:56pm | IP Logged 
I can't read IPA so it just looks like a bunch of chicken scratch to me. I just try to imitate native speakers or use "prow-nunn-see-ay-shun". Knock it all you want but I can say the words and that's all that counts in by book.
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daegga
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Austria
lang-8.com/553301
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 Message 28 of 30
02 October 2014 at 4:04pm | IP Logged 
Tollpatchig wrote:
I can't read IPA so it just looks like a bunch of chicken scratch to
me. I just try to imitate native speakers or use "prow-nunn-see-ay-shun". Knock it all
you want but I can say the words and that's all that counts in by book.


It gets problematic when your target language uses sounds that don't exist in your native
language. You might even hear the wrong sound because of the automatic approximation
process going on in your brain (ie. mapping to known sounds), so imitating native
speakers doesn't always work. IPA transcriptions plus a guide on how to pronounce the
different IPA symbols helps in that case. IPA is easy to learn (at least passively), it's
just another alphabet.
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Doitsujin
Diglot
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Germany
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 Message 29 of 30
02 October 2014 at 5:49pm | IP Logged 
@Tollpatchig: Gabriel Wyner has created two well-done, foolproof videos that explain the IPA symbols for French.

French Video 1: The French Consonants and the IPA
French Video 2: The French Vowels

(As a byproduct, he also teaches the IPA symbols of many English consonants and vowels.)

Note that many vowels used in French also exist in German (and other languages). For example:

French rue [ʀy] vs. German Tür [ty:ɐ̯]
French bleu [blø] vs. German blöd [b:t]

Edited by Doitsujin on 02 October 2014 at 7:18pm

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Tollpatchig
Senior Member
United States
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Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Maltese

 
 Message 30 of 30
02 October 2014 at 5:57pm | IP Logged 
daegga wrote:
Tollpatchig wrote:
I can't read IPA so it just looks like a bunch of chicken scratch to
me. I just try to imitate native speakers or use "prow-nunn-see-ay-shun". Knock it all
you want but I can say the words and that's all that counts in by book.


It gets problematic when your target language uses sounds that don't exist in your native
language. You might even hear the wrong sound because of the automatic approximation
process going on in your brain (ie. mapping to known sounds), so imitating native
speakers doesn't always work. IPA transcriptions plus a guide on how to pronounce the
different IPA symbols helps in that case. IPA is easy to learn (at least passively), it's
just another alphabet.


I should say that imitation is the best way for *me* to learn how to say words. I'm sure that IPA is a very helpful tool and it may in fact be easy to learn. But I tend to not remember what is said in pronuncation guides but I can remember how a native said the word. I simply remember things better from context and by doing, I can review flashcards in Anki and I'll struggle to remember words but if I see that word later in a sentence and I say "hey that was one of my words" and I look up the meaning, it's more solid in my mind and I can recall that word better. Same with pronunciation, after reading and hearing various words said by natives I start to figure out patterns and match letters to sounds.


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