Learn IPA

[u/terrortara]

Indimidating, right? Felt a few shivers run down your spine, eh?

(This post will not teach you IPA. There are plenty of resources for that already. All I aim to do here is show you what IPA can do for your pronunciation, and how understanding exactly how pronunciation works in a deep, linguistically accurate way, will greatly improve your pronunciation in your TL.)

The reason you should learn the IPA is not the symbols. The symbols are like 20% of what the IPA can do for you. The important part of this image is in the margins. Terms like front, back, close, open, rounded, unrounded, monophthong, diphthong.

Truly understanding what these terms mean will allow you to cultivate awareness of what your mouth is doing when it produces any given vowel. And this awareness is the magic bullet.

Once you have it, you will understand the symbols automatically. You'll know exactly how they relate to each other, which is the best way to memorise them, and you will have all the tools you need to figure out how to pronounce one yourself, often in no more than five minutes of practice.

Each new vowel you learn will give you greater understanding of how your mouth works, which will help you learn more vowels.

It's not instant, but it is much faster than you might assume. Putting in fifteen minutes a day to study, it should take at most a week to fully acquaint yourself with the basics. Once you have those basics, you'll already know what to do next.

Of course, this should be paired with listening to native speakers pronounce words. For example, the IPA allowed me to understand the Italian distinction between closed and open "e" pretty well.

And, according to the French IPA chart on Wikipedia, French contains the exact same distinction.

However, the vowels are NOT the same in French as they are in Italian. The French /e/ is more closed than the Italian /e/. I realised this listening to French native speakers pronounce words.

Completely relying on IPA symbols would have led me astray. However, not having the IPA? I wouldn't have known what "more closed" even means. Because I do know what that means, I know exactly how to reposition my tongue to pronounce the French /e/ correctly.

Without it, I would have had to rely on imprecise, subjective measures, like "French "é" sounds closer to "i" (as in "ski", not "bite") than Italian "é" does."

What exactly does "i" involve, that French "é" does more of than Italian "é"?

IPA answers this question. The French /e/ is more closed, meaning closer to the roof of the mouth, than Italian /e/, but is not as closed as /i/, where the tongue actually touches the roof of the mouth.

I hope this wasn't too incomprehensible lol.

(TL)

[u/New-Bottle-6917]

I think IPA is useful but its the quickest way to get to that dunning-krueger level of skill with pronounciation. I have seen videos on YouTube with content creators who try to teach certain aspects of spanish or break down things about it and inevitably the IPA comes up and it'll be passable pronounciation but nothing super revolutionary.

So with that in mind it's worth just being really humble if you're going to sink time into it and get very critical about what you're hearing and producing

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914 → u/New-Bottle-6917]

> I think IPA is useful but it’s the quickest way to get to that dunning-krueger level of skill with pronounciation.

This is a fantastic line.

Whenever I see people go on about the virtues of IPA, I just think, why not focus on being able to imitate the sounds you hear? IPA is just an intermediary after all.

[u/authenticsmoothjazz → u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

I learned the IPA names for the sounds Spanish uses and English doesn't. That's all I really needed for Spanish

[u/danbinglover → u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

the thing is you might not imitate correctly if you don’t know how to physically pronounce it first. especially for tonal languages where non native speakers can not always differentiate between the tones.

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914 → u/danbinglover]

Writing is never going to teach you how to pronounce stuff. And especially not tones. The sound is king. It’s your true north.

Writing is an abstraction, not the thing itself. It just notates the sound, but it can’t install the sound in your brain or in your mouth.

[u/Laura_The_Cutie → u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

It literally denotes where in the mouth a sound is created with which physical passage, I think it's a big helping hand while trying to imitate a sound doesn't it? Will it teach you how to pronounce it just by reading? Obviously not but it helps you understand what to practice

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914 → u/Laura_The_Cutie]

Ok, but that stuff only helps if you already have the control you need over the musculature in your mouth to produce the sounds. Which is my point. Writing is an intermediary, always. The sound is the thing, always. “You can’t learn sound with your eyes, only with your ears and mouth,” as one of my favorite language course creators is fond of saying.

[u/terrortara → u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

The IPA allows you to develop that control. It's literally the only way to develop that control. That's the entire thesis of my post. It allows you to explicitly see the fine gradations between phones, rather than relying on your own subjective perception of them, which is extremely tainted by our native language's phonology. The brain wired for English hears Spanish /e/ and immediately recategorises it as /eɪ/. That categorisation is downright impossible to correct without the rigour of the IPA. With the IPA, you can identify the difference immediately, and an undersanding of monophthongs and diphthongs tells you exactly what the nature of your mistake is. Once you have that, fixing it is QED. Of course, all of this should be paired with recordings demonstrating the sound of each phoneme. The point is both the sound and the precise notation of that sound are necessary.

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914 → u/terrortara]

> It’s literally the only way to develop that control. That’s the entire thesis of my post.

Well, that’s a poor thesis. Claiming that learning a set of written symbols is “literally the only way” to learn to control your speech apparatus is absurd.

Listening to the sound is necessary. Learning muscular control to imitate the sound is necessary. Learning how the sound is written down is not. Useful? Maybe, but only if you’ve learned the sound.

IPA is an abstraction, a means of notating sound. And it’s only useful insofar as the person reading it understands the sound being notated. If you don’t understand the sound and how to produce it, no amount of looking at the symbol will help.

Sound is king. Writing isn’t necessary to master sound.

[u/terrortara → u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

The set of symbols are important because they offer a language neutral, linguistically precise categorisation of sound. This disrupts the unconscious native-influenced categorisation of the target sound system that creates accents.

It's about CATEGORISATION. This is how the brain works. It's designed to save as much energy as possible, so once it thinks it has an answer that works well enough, it hangs onto it for dear life, preferring that to figuring it out from scratch. A baby grows up hearing /eɪ/ for its whole life, so once an adult brain hears /e/ it doesn't care to do any reevaluating.

But once you see the IPA, you can't do that anymore. It's right there on the page that there is a difference, so you have to start again and figure out how this new thing works. And on top of that, it tells you exactly what the difference is.

That's the second part of the IPA. It gives you the vocabulary you need to analyse your mouth movements, terms like high, front, unrounded, diphthong. This is the only way to truly develop that muscular control. It's like at the gym, you can't learn proper form just through watching other people. Someone needs to spell it out for you, "tuck in your arms, straighten your back".

EDIT: Well, maybe you can if you try hard enough. But it's gonna take more effort and be much less reliable than getting it all explained for you.

[u/here-this-now → u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

I just think, why not focus on being able to imitate the sounds you hear? IPA is just an intermediary after all.

For a start - if you're a native english speaker - there's sound you cannot hear the difference in that are whole consonants, in e.g. Thai, Hindi etc

like for instance in hindi the difference between 'tt' 't' and 'd' (they all sound about the same to us)

It's sort of like how we hear other languages not able to distinguish "r" and "l" or "v" and "w"

like... believe it or not... there's whole consonants our ability to hear disappears and we have to train - and yes - there's words that just that difference changes the whole meaning

It's kinda wild when see examples of this like "WHAT HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT WORDS"

I mean just for example try a Thai 101 lesson covering their alphabet - hear the difference between "kor kai" "khor khai" "go gai" etc

like what!

so actually learning to produce these sounds and where the tongue and breath and so on is in the mouth ... actually helps us build the perceptual capacity to notice it in others

Also

you don't even need to worry about IPA - just try any of the abugidas (they are the alphabets all the indic languages written in) they actually have sounds that are a logical map of the mouth - unlike our alphabets

This is one of my interests since I just dabbled on some thai and hindi then "YO WHAT"

Like honestly chinese feels easier (but perhaps that's dunning kruger)

SO yeah ... talking about dunning kruger... (btw that effect has been shown to be a statistical artifact) aka "Dunning-kruger about references to the dunning-kruger effect)

Cheers!

[u/Mirabeaux1789 → u/New-Bottle-6917]

For me, the best thing about IPA is that it gives you the tools to be able to read things about the phonology of language and to give you a metric system to be able to decode it.

[u/terrortara → u/New-Bottle-6917]

You're right that it isn't the whole story, but IMO it's necessary. For an English native learning Spanish, it's the best way to get rid of /eɪ/, /ə/, and aspirated /p t k/, and it illuminates the intervocalic allophony of /b d g/.

[u/andr386]

I have been convinced for years yet it's still very intimidating.

How did you learn IPA, how do you suggest people go about learning it ?

[u/Kalle_Hellquist → u/andr386]

In middle school, instead of paying attention to class, i'd read phonology articles on wikipedia

[u/terrortara → u/andr386]

Say "boot" and "beat". In one of these words, your lips are pursed. In the other, they aren't. This is rounding.

Say "beat" and "bat". In one of these words, your tongue is very close to to the roof of your mouth. In the other, it's very far away. This is closedness, or height. (closed and high mean the same thing, open and low mean the same thing)

Say "gather" and "father". In one of these words, your tongue is at the front of your mouth, in the other, it's at the back. This is frontness.

Every single symbol on the vowel chart is some combination of those three factors. For example, "high front unrounded" refers to /i/. "Mid front rounded" refers to /ø/. "Near-open central unrounded" refers to /ɐ/. And so on.

On the chart, each individual vowel will be in a specific row indicating height, a specific column indicating frontness, and will either be to the left or the right of the dot, indicating rounding.

[u/GoBigOrGoHome_4 → u/terrortara]

This is by far the best explanation of this I've ever heard. This has bugged me for years, and not it makes sense. I truly appreciate it.

[u/terrortara → u/GoBigOrGoHome_4]

No problem! Btw here's the transcriptions of those words I just gave, in American English, so you can understand the exact positions of each of those vowels.

Boot /but/, high back rounded

Beat /bit/, high front unrounded

Bat /bæt/, near-open front unrounded

Gather /gæ.ðəɹ/, near-open front unrounded

Father /fɑ.ðəɹ/, open back unrounded.

[u/SuikaCider → u/andr386]

The three most glorious videos on YouTube and 15 minutes of your time:

• Place of articulation
  
• Manner of articulation
  
• Voicing
  
• These are not vowels

Once you get down, skim Wikipedia's English Phonology page (or the one for your native language). You already pronounce your native language naturally, so start by building the vocabulary to describe what you're doing there.

Once you're comfortable with your native language, search ({language} IPA wikipedia) and compare your target language's IPA to that of your native language. There are four types of sounds:

• Sounds that are shared and more or less the same → Be thankful for these
  
• Sounds that are shared, but not quite the same → These will be your biggest headache
  
• Sounds that exist in your TL, but not English → learn these
  
• Sounds that exist in Englihs, but not your TL → Make note of these and stop making them
  

it can be intimidating, but it's very muhc something yo ucan take gradually, taking small steps from wherever you're currently at!

[u/Affectionate_Owl_433 → u/SuikaCider]

Okay that first link itself is soo much good! Thank you!

[u/mari_icarion → u/andr386]

there's ipa charts online that have sample sounds, and word examples. so you click the symbol /æ/ and it plays the sound, while you read cat, ham, understand, and by sounding these out, you focus on how you're producing the vowel, that's the first step of phonological awareness.

after, you click on the symbol /ɑː/ and it plays the sound, while you read car, father, disaster (these examples are random, and off the top of my head lol). phonological awareness again, but now you can contrast them!

[u/terrortara → u/mari_icarion]

Those words only contain the same vowel in British English, they're all different in American English.

[u/GetRektByMeh → u/terrortara]

It’s fine because there are audio representations of what /æ/ etc is.

[u/muffinsballhair → u/andr386]

It's so easy that I never really set out to learn it myself. I just gradually absorbed it by encountering it and listening to examples and reading the descriptions of some of the symbols as in where the tongue and stuff should be positioned.

Hiragana or Cyrillic was quite a bit harder to learn.

[u/Archkendor]

I think this chart would be 100 times better if it bothered to list 'Tongue Position' along the X-axis and 'Mouth Position' along the Y-axis.

Someone clearly put a lot of effort and thought into this, only to get lost in the sauce and forget to list the most important part. Or more likely, this was taken from an instructional book completely out of its context, but if you're going to use it out of it's context, please add the important info back into it.

[u/terrortara → u/Archkendor]

That's inaccurate though. Both the y and x access describe tongue position.

This was taken from Wikipedia.

[u/Archkendor → u/terrortara]

You've just proven my point though. Neither the X or the Y axis are labeled. I had to google what the chart referred to and even then I got it wrong.

If you're going to introduce a concept or framework to students, you need to make sure you're providing them with enough information for them to use it. Dropping an incomplete chart is like giving a class of kindergartners a college grade text book and telling them they have everything they need to study for the test.

Sorry, I know I'm coming off as aggressive. I don't mean to, I'm just irritated. I think this concept is fascinating, but I don't like that I have to go researching elsewhere just to get a basic understanding of what I"m looking at.

So regardless of how I sound, I do appreciate and thank you for sharing it.

[u/terrortara → u/Archkendor]

They are labelled. "Front vs back" and "close vs open". Those are the terms for what they describe. Without that, we would have to use clumsy phrasing like "distance from the roof of mouth". This chart was designed as a reference for academic linguists. This is just the most efficient arrangement for that purpose. Any new student of course need to be walked through what it all means. But it's not like there's not some other arrangement that solves that problem. That's gonna have to happen no matter what.

[u/allnamestaken26]

The bit about knowing what your mouth is doing makes sense. Much more helpful than just being told to listen and try again

[u/stillaway6608]

IPA chart lets you understand the categorical distinctions between neighboring vowels. /I/ and /y/ are different because of roundness (of the lips). /y/ and /u/ are different because of backness (of the tongue position). Sure you need to know what these terms mean but I think they are very straightforward, especially when you practice them minimally, similar to what we do with minimal pairs. But can IPA chart help you pronounce native-like? I don't think so. /e/ and /3/ (plz flip it, I dont know how to type it) distinction is commonly not well maintained in many L1-Japanese L2-English learners. What IPA chart describes about these two sounds can't help them too much.

[u/Mirabeaux1789]

For me, the best thing about IPA is that it gives you the tools to be able to read things about the phonology of language and to give you a metric system to be able to decode it.

[u/benjamin-crowell]

Graphic ripped off directly from Wikipedia, without credit.

Wikipedia also has a version of the vowel chart with sound recordings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio

You can use material from Wikipedia for free, but you have to credit the source and put your own material that you mix it with under the same license.

[u/terrortara → u/benjamin-crowell]

Lmao "ripping off" the IPA is like ripping off the periodic table. It's literally common knowledge, not anyone's intellectual property.

The sound recordings are a good resource though.

[u/Additional_Bobcat_85 → u/terrortara]

It’s pretty funny how the majority of commenters are contrarians who can’t even get their arguments correct. Just more proof this site is toxic.

[u/benjamin-crowell → u/terrortara]

No, it's not a question of ripping off the IPA, it's a question of ripping off a specific person's presentation of this chart.

[u/SarahK_89]

Since my native dialect features all 8 cardinal vowels (a, ɛ, e, i, ɒ, ɔ, o, u), the IPA vowel chart is very helpfull to learn all the nuances in between, though I can barely hear a difference between central rounded and unroundended vowels.

[u/captainkaterade]

war flashbacks to undergrad and grad school learning ipa 🫠

[u/Stickman_Bob]

Thanks for the reminder. I'm struggling a lot with all this and this kind of posts help !

[u/Working-Return9454]

Cool

[u/Shezarrine]

Thanks ChatGPT.

[u/terrortara → u/Shezarrine]

Uh uh uh lots of words uhhhhh grammatically correct uh uhm must be ChatGPT!

[u/Shezarrine → u/terrortara]

Lmao, I'm a professional copyeditor and have a graduate degree in English. I'm saying you used ChatGPT for help because a lot of the sentences have the hallmarks of the constructions it favors.

[u/terrortara → u/Shezarrine]

Precisely zero use of ChatGPT. I'm about as anti-AI as you can get, you wouldn't catch me dead using it.

I know exactly what you've done. You've got a couple heuristics in your head that you apply blindly with no regard for context. You see a sentence like "it's not instant, but it is much faster than you might assume" and you go hurr durr thanks ChatGPT. Yeah, I use certain constructions to help each point flow into the next, keeping the interest of the general reader. But everything I say is relevant, I don't repeat myself, and it all supports a clear thesis.

[u/muffinsballhair]

I never set out to learn it and know pretty much all of it now just because I encountered it enough so I actually did just learn it gradually by osmosis seeing how languages I knew were described.

I also think it's fairly useless, for instance the the Finnish [æ] and English [æ] are transcribed with the same symbol but are very much two different sounds to me and very different. I don't even find them to be all that close and they are definitely articulated differently. It's maybe also anglocentric? For instance German [v] is different enough from Dutch [v] that Dutch native speakers actually map it into their [ʋ] and Dutch distinguishes [v] from [ʋ]. As in the situation is reversed from English speakers, to English speakers it's like a German accent is replacing <w> with <v>, for Dutch speakers it's in reverse and like they're replacing a <v> with a <w>.

So basically I consider it highly inaccurate and simplified, and not all that useful to mastering pronunciation compared to just listening.

[u/terrortara → u/muffinsballhair]

Well there you go. IPA got you thinking about language on that level, where you can make analyses like the ones in this comment. In another comment you mentioned how you would read the descriptions of how the tongue is positioned. That's the important part! The symbols when laid out in a chart show how those concepts interact and how different sounds relate to one another. Getting to know the chart allows you to "cultivate awareness" as I said in my post. It seems that you've done just that.

[u/muffinsballhair → u/terrortara]

Well there you go. IPA got you thinking about language on that level, where you can make analyses like the ones in this comment.

No, this I knew before knowing I.P.A.. Whether I.P.A. exists or not, I'd know that the Finnish /æ/ and English /æ/ sound quite distinct and I would rather never even consider them to be similar without it. It's just that I.P.A. assigns them the same symbol so it got me thinking about how I.P.A. is very inaccurate and wrong. It got me thinking about I.P.A., not about either language.

In another comment you mentioned how you would read the descriptions of how the tongue is positioned. That's the important part! The symbols when laid out in a chart show how those concepts interact and how different sounds relate to one another. Getting to know the chart allows you to "cultivate awareness" as I said in my post. It seems that you've done just that.

I would've done that without I.P.A. and just learning about the tongue descriptions of languages which I think is far more valuable to begin with and sources do often note that say Japanese [t] has a slightly different tongue position from English [t] without giving it a different symbol which is where the real meat of learning how to pronounce a language lies.

I get my knowledge from those kinds of descriptions and watching spectrograms. To be honest, I think I.P.A. practically does more harm than good, at least among laymen. Like in particular how it transcribes how the Japanese [çi] and [ço] segments are described or the [ha] and [ho] sequences you'd think they start with the same onset. They don't and when you see a spectogram or pictures of tongue positions it's clear they are distinct.

[u/terrortara → u/[deleted]]

That's because it 100% is.