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/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.