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International Phonetic Alphabet | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Zhuangzi Nonaglot Language Program Publisher Senior Member Canada lingq.com Joined 7030 days ago 646 posts - 688 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Japanese, Swedish, Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian | Message 89 of 94 16 January 2008 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Cait,
At LingQ we will be adding the ability to chunk 3 second sound bits from the sound files and add them to the LingQ card, and therefore to your vocabulary lists.We could add a notes section to the LingQ card, if we can design it so it is not too cluttered. We have not yet put up our Pronunciation section, which was a part of the old Linguist system. It will have a number of new features, although there are no plans to include IPA. All of this will happen in the next few months. Members have a lot of influence on how we develop LingQ. If we have a lot of interest in IPA we could look at ways of including it. We will, for example, probably be adding an algorithm based spaced repetition system even though I personally am not a great fan of them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| CaitO'Ceallaigh Triglot Senior Member United States katiekelly.wordpress Joined 6859 days ago 795 posts - 829 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian Studies: Czech, German | Message 90 of 94 16 January 2008 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've thought over my last post, and I've come to the conclusion that I doubt that I would use the IPA myself in my daily sessions with LingQ, BUT in general, when I come across a new word in a dictionary, if I do see an IPA spelling, it is helfpul. I barely know what the IPA is. We had to learn it in a linguistics class, and I just couldn't get myself to memorize it.
If I were learning a new language from scratch, like Swedish, even in LingQ, seeing the spelling in the IPA in the included dictionary might be a benefit to me. Just for starters. I mean this as a self-learner who can't afford to pay for someone to help me learn how to pronounce words properly. The IPA shouldn't be so easily dismissed. EDIT: I wrote this before Steve's last response. Also, I must apologize for turning this into a LingQ forum. I am sensitive to why people might be bothered by this. Edited by CaitO'Ceallaigh on 16 January 2008 at 3:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| edwin Triglot Senior Member Canada towerofconfusi&Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6466 days ago 160 posts - 183 votes 9 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French, Spanish, Portuguese | Message 91 of 94 16 January 2008 at 3:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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The teacher that I mentioned in the accent reduction course knew IPA well. She fixed people's accents as well as helped people with speech disabilities. As a professional speech analyst, She must learn IPA.
As she was drawing those symbols to us, she kept reminding us that we didn't need to know them. We only needed to know the principles such as tongue placement, voicing, aspiration, etc. This is what I mean by IPA being an 'overkill' to a typical language learner. Many of us, as typical language learners, would come across IPA somehow, but we probably have not learned it in its entirety. If you have, you would probably agree with me. The word 'overkill' might upset some people, but I am still trying to think of a replacement word. There are many pronunciation schemes that are specific to a language and represent the sounds more accurately. IPA is just an attempt to generalize all the sounds in many languages. As a rule of thumb in our daily lives, a general-purpose tool is often not as good as a special-purpose tool. Disclaimer: I am not ignoring any positive aspects of IPA other forum members have shared. I am not forcing anyone to abandon IPA. Any potential personal attack will be reported to the administrator right away. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tpark Tetraglot Pro Member Canada Joined 7048 days ago 118 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, German, Dutch, French Personal Language Map | Message 92 of 94 16 January 2008 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Knowing IPA is useful for some activities. For dealing with Wikipedia, studying phonetics and linguistics, and for working with certain pronunciation programs ("The Rhythm of French" for example) an understanding of IPA is essential. Many dictionaries have the IPA representation of words, so it's possible to get a reasonably good idea of how a particular word is pronounced, especially where the pronunciation is inconsistent with what you would expect from the spelling.
I find IPA a useful tool for language learning. Perhaps it's not for everyone, but everyone learns differently. For interested individuals, here's a link to the Wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet If you have a copy of Peter Ladefoged's book, "A Course in Phonetics" there's a chart on the inside cover explaining the symbols used in the IPA. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 93 of 94 16 January 2008 at 9:11pm | IP Logged | ||
They exist. Quoth the article: "Notable systems include Kirshenbaum, SAMPA, and X-SAMPA." 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kualidu Triglot Groupie Mexico Joined 6208 days ago 93 posts - 102 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, EnglishC2 Studies: GermanB1 | Message 94 of 94 17 January 2008 at 1:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Yesterday I was at a store and saw a Rosetta Stone course on display and as I was going to ask the guy at the counter to see it I realized I didn't know how to pronounce Rosetta. Was it "roseta" as with a Spanish pronounciation or "rosita" as Speedy Gonzalez' girlfriend's name? It didn't really matter because the guy spoke no English at all. So I just said "Ro-se-ta Es-to-ne". Asking for Tell-me-more was something like "Telly mi amore". As I didn't find any English speakers on my way back home (they're some 2000 miles up north) I found the right pronunciation in the dictionary.
I also remember one time when I was teaching English to kids and one asked me the pronunciation of the word owl. I pronounced "ow" as "cow" but later I found "ow" was as in low. My English pronunciation is very good (they say) and many times I have been passed for an American in the US. However, there's nothing more irregular for me about English than its pronunciation. While in Spanish letter A keeps the same sound all the time, in English it can be: about all half ate car in combination with other letters you just never know hay meat dial boat haul I don't know the whole IPA but for me it's been a great tool that has helped me tame that three-headed monster called "English pronunciation". My approach is similar to what others have expressed here: a combination of both listening and relating it that sound to a particular symbol. It helps a lot to represent those sounds that seem to be the same for an untrained Spanish ear but that are actually different in English. day vs. they called vs. cold bit vs. beat vowel vs. bowel zoo vs. Sue think vs. sink When I taught English I had students who told me they didn't want to speak with a strong accent. They said things like: Good morneen I speak a leetle beet of Eengleesh. Day gwen too a paRtee last naig-t /with a rolling R/ So I would ask them to listen and repeat. Listen and repeat. And after listening and repeating 1000 times they finally started making the distinction between a short and a long vowel, between dental d /they/ and alveolar d /day/. In all cases, somebody would ask: But how can I know the right pronunciation of a word? Then I'd explain SOME IPA symbols (like I vs. i: for short and long vowels or θ] vs.[ð] (After all, they were already present in their English books --I'm speaking of Longman, Oxford and Cambridge U. Press). I never had a student complaining about learning some strange symbols. On the contrary, they were very happy to learn a new tool for their pronunciation efforts. I always recommended it as a "reference" tool --not as something they had to learn. Edited by Kualidu on 17 January 2008 at 1:21am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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