IPA sucks! No doubt about it. I admit it is a pain in the butt. No one likes those silly symbols. Teachers hate them. Students detest them and most native speakers (of English) have never even heard about them. What is IPA anyway? It’s
International Phonetic Alphabet
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVr3AUPXbF0&w=300&h=200]
Although I realize it is not something you would enjoy learning about as a learner, these sound symbols can be extremely useful for you. Why? Well because English is a very tricky language, and spelling is ALWAYS different from sound. Unlike most languages, you can never rely on spelling to figure out how to pronounce a word in English. There is a big disconnect between the written and spoken word. The result of this, at least for learners, is absolute PAIN. You don’t believe me? Just ask any Spanish, Italian, French or other language learners, and see what they tell you about it. All my students used to bitch about it “In my language, if you see [a], you say [a], if you see [e], you say [e], why does it have to be so difficult in English?”. Despite the temptation, I’m not going to even consider answering that. All I can say is this:
You need the IPA.
You need it because it’s stable, consistent and relatively reliable. Make sure you get it from one source though, like this website for example and stick with it. Yes it’s going to be difficult in the beginning, yes you’re going to be confused and frustrated but trust me, it’s worth it. When you get the hang of it, it’ll seriously a be a big help to you. How? When you happen to be reading an article (like the one you’re reading now), a book, an email or any English text and you stumble across a couple of words which you have no clue about how to pronounce, you can grab your dictionary and look up their IPA, and the IPA will be your reference. You keep doing that for a while consistently, and I promise your pronunciation will improve dramatically. But there’s only problem you’ve got to overcome first. You’ve got to learn how to distinguish between one IPA and another as well as pronounce them correctly. That is a difficult task that requires some training, but once you do that, it’s all easy.
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