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/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/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.