IPA do you use/know it? (I'm not talking about Indian Pale Ale)

[Odair]

I like to use IPA as a begginer, but farther than that, it is the dictionary-makers that get to decide wheather I will use IPA or not, which means I don't use it anymore at all.

[MorkTheFiddle]

My vote was for 0, but I have heard of IPA. How could you belong to this forum and not hear about it?
However, never have I ever heard of Indian Pale Ale.

[MaggieMae]

I voted 1. I can understand it in the rare cases that I come across it, mostly on Wikipedia, but I very rarely seek IPA out for use.

[zenmonkey]

I learned IPA in college and even got a certificate.
I don’t find it particularly useful or exact, I’ve written about the issues before.

It’s certainly structured well enough that I’d prefer it as a transcript system to a lot of stuff used today. But I haven’t really found it used in the learning material I use for the languages I’m learning now. I did use it quite a bit with early German learning but then it’s relatively easy to learn German pronunciation without. And even with, regionalisms will get you. I prefer to actually listen.

[PeterMollenburg]

However, never have I ever heard of Indian Pale Ale.

Me neither! Beer interests me not!

[IronMike]

*India Pale Ale

[Querneus]

I like to say IPA and the understanding of phonology/phonetics implied in it is probably the most useful thing that linguistics has produced for language learning. Just down it with India pale ale at hand, if needed. I use it all the time, nearly daily, for English and French. (Pinyin in Mandarin accomplishes much the same thing, though in a less direct way, and as a consequence I certainly almost never see IPA for Mandarin. Though I know how it goes for that language too.)

I just wish there was a similarly standardized notation for intonation...

[jimmy]

oh, I am wondering whether IPA really exists.
unless this is something supported by "pronunciation" in voice, then ,I think there is nothing like that.
I say it because every nationality understands different things even from the same symbols.

[jeff_lindqvist]

What jimmy said.

I just had a look at Swedish phonology. We have the long å which has the IPA symbol [oː]. However, when I look for how the symbol is used in other languages I see examples like English yawn [joːn] and Spanish camión [kaˈmjoːn]. (Of course, the information on Wikipedia may be wrong...) Neither is particularly close to any Swedish manifestation of the long å. Now, it is said that it's "often diphthongized to [oə̯]" which makes a lot more sense. Anyway, I'm just saying that one symbol can mean different things for different readers.

[księżycowy]

I can't say I go out of my way to seek out IPA, or use it if there is audio/native orthography available. But I understand the basic concept of IPA and will use it if A) a course uses it to romanize a script it doesn't teach (I'm thinking of a few courses I have for dialectal Arabic and one for Mehri which use romanization with IPA symbols instead of Arabic script) or B) as a quick and dirty check of pronunciation for a language (mostly thinking of Irish here).