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The dreaded IPA | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| boaby Newbie Ireland Joined 5278 days ago 16 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Portuguese, Catalan | Message 17 of 30 14 May 2010 at 2:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Egill mentioned the Paul Meier site which has some very good flash charts of the IPA, but the resource that
has helped me the most to learn to recognise the IPA symbols is much less academic. At http://cambridgeenglishonline.com/Phonetics_Focus/ you can find a range of flash-based quizzes and games that help develop automatic recognition of the symbols. The site seems intended for kids and is totally focussed on English but as that is my native language it's the best place to start. I'm still working on the consonants like / β - ð - θ - ʒ - ç /. But, the full range of vowels such as / æ - ɐ - ɑ - ɒ - ə / are still too sonically and visually similar for me to identify yet. On a different note, the only way I could get the forum to display these IPA symbols was to input their HTML entities even though I don't need to do in any text application I use on my laptop. Edited by boaby on 14 May 2010 at 2:16am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5784 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 18 of 30 24 May 2010 at 9:28am | IP Logged | ||
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It would be great if somebody took a universal-ish text with accompanying recordings and created bilingual IPA/base language texts out of them. You could get exposure to IPA through real content with L-R or do straight analysis without the audio. Theoretically, if you could find appropriate materials for diverse enough languages (with correct enough pronunciation), you could learn the whole IPA sound system.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6237 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 19 of 30 24 May 2010 at 10:05am | IP Logged | ||
Doubtful - you're not going to hear all of the distinctions, there are plenty of edge cases (ie, some languages have dento-alveolar consonants in free variation, while other languages contrast them, so you'll be hearing different things with the same IPA symbols, when you probably can't hear the difference to begin with, further muddying the waters). You're much better off with a phonetics textbook. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5784 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 20 of 30 24 May 2010 at 6:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Do you think you'd end up with the same muddied situation if you generated the IPA transcription based on the audio, rather than the text, taking into account the variations you mentioned?
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6237 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 21 of 30 24 May 2010 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes. IPA is an abstraction. It's a very useful one, but in practice, speech sounds are a continuum, and which symbol to use can become a matter of judgment. I hadn't recently dreamed of trying to work from the text, rather than the audio - that's just begging for disastrously silly results, unfortunately, short of essentially writing most of a good text to speech system, and even then it's not perfect. The best way I can think of doing this is a very narrow transcription (trying to get every last detail), but this is next to unreadable. It's more conventional, and usually more useful, to give a wide transcription (which shows contrasting phonemes but blurs together underlying phones which are realized differently*). Trying to generate this in a language-independent way strikes me as a hard problem - I've been thinking about these topics a lot over the last couple of years. * for instance, it'd differentiate between pin and bin in English, but not the p in pin and the p in spin - one's aspirated, one isn't. In Hindi and Mandarin, aspiration is phonetically contrastive; in English it isn't. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6875 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 22 of 30 25 May 2010 at 1:24am | IP Logged | ||
http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=052 1637511 Each chapter is of 3 pages or so dedicated to a single language. The book covers a lot of languages; most modern ones I guess. Each chapter has a short summary of each language and its features with a text to close in both standard orthography and IPA transcriptions in both narrow and broad format. ** I just checked the book. Languages included number around 30, including: American English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Catalan, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Sindhi, Taba, Thai, Tukang Besi, Turkish.. I have the 1999 publication, so different years may have different languages. Edited by andee on 26 May 2010 at 2:22am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| gmatt539 Newbie Canada Joined 4893 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 23 of 30 05 September 2013 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | ||
That site is fantastic in learning IPA for English. Thanks very much. Edited by gmatt539 on 05 September 2013 at 7:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5026 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 24 of 30 06 September 2013 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Knowing IPA is quite convenient. It allows me to quickly grasp foreign language phonologies during initial learning (descriptions like "sort of like the p in English, but with your tongue licking your nose" are too inexact for me). I use it to write down pronunciations of words quickly. I read it and am able to understand more advanced linguistic works. I make flashcards with it. Essentially, it grants me more precision when approaching language, just like math helps various social scientists communicate their ideas.
But I study a lot of languages and I'm interested in some of the more theoretical aspects of linguistics. I'm the kind of person who, when bored, will pick a random language and read about its grammar and phonology, and in this, IPA is illuminating. If I studied very few languages and only for practical reasons, then use of IPA would be less advantageous. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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