Postby garyb » Sat May 28, 2022 12:15 pm
IPA was an absolute essential when I was learning French, both for understanding the sounds and how to produce them (particularly vowels) and because the orthography is irregular enough that it's usually sensible to check the pronunciation of any new word in a dictionary.
Unless the learner has a really good ear for picking out and reproducing sounds, I'd say that proper study of the pronunciation is essential to speak comprehensible French, and even to understand it and identify words with similar but different sounds like "roue" and "rue".
IPA isn't the only tool for the job, but I feel it's the best simply because it's well established and described and is standard in resources like dictionaries. It's like the argument for teaching grammar using established grammatical terms: you need to codify it somehow anyway, so you're better off using the established system rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and inevitably come up with something less useful, as many "anti-grammar" resources do.
IPA does have its limitations. As I posted in another recent thread, it's useful for comparing different sounds in the same language, but not so much for comparing different languages. The examples I gave were the French /u/ and /y/ (as in the words above) compared to the English /u/ which is somewhere in between them; /u/ is a "closed back rounded vowel", but the French one is more closed, more back, and more rounded while the English one is closer to the middle and so somewhere in between the two French sounds. IPA, as used in practice, also doesn't usually account for articulations like dental versus alveolar consonants and light and dark L; it does provide annotations to specify these, but they're not used very commonly.
It wasn't quite as important for Italian, but it was still extremely useful for quickly checking open versus closed E and O (in "standard" pronunciation), syllable stress, and occasional irregularities in the dictionary.
Now that I'm mostly focusing on Spanish and German, I don't feel I need IPA much. Neither had any truly new sounds for me (German has a few awkward ones, but none that I didn't already know from French!) and the pronunciation is regular enough that dictionaries often don't even use IPA.
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