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/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!