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

[rdearman]

I was reading Sprachprofi's post about IPA and I thought I would do a little poll. I have just put a scale in from 0-6 with zero being "never used it, never even heard of it before" to 6 which is "I use IPA every single day to check my pronunciation and learn new languages"

[philomath]

I learned the IPA when I took a couple of linguistics courses during university. I've found it incredibly useful for learning languages. I chose 4 because at the beginning stages of learning a language I use the IPA a lot, but once I'm at an intermediate level I refer to it much less often. How much I need it also depends on the language.

I recently saw a discussion in one of the language logs about how IPA is good for comparing sounds in the same language but not for comparing sounds between languages, and I agree with that. Knowing the IPA will help you make generally the right sounds for your target language, but even with all of the IPA diacritics you'll need to do other things in order to polish your pronunciation.

[tractor]

I voted 6, but it's not entirely true because I don't study languages every single day and because I don't look up words in a dictionary with IPA every time I study.

I learnt IPA at school, in English classes. That was in 4th grade, so that must have been in 1984.

[galaxyrocker]

I use it any time I'm specifically working on pronunciation, so I voted for a 6. It's been an invaluable resource for helping me at least understand how to theoretically make the right sounds, without having to rely on English approximations. This has been especially amazing for Irish, as there's about double the amount of consonant phonemes, often with a distinction of palatalisation. While I can't make them all, I know theoretically what can be done, and don't assume my pronunciation is good, which I've also found helpful in practicing.

I learnt IPA at school, in English classes. That was in 4th grade, so that must have been in 1984.

I find this quite interesting. I was arguing with someone the other day who sees no point of learning the IPA for languages (and has, quite understandably, fairly anglicised Irish) because nobody learns it in school and uses it regularly. My experience has shown this is very much an anglophone issue. Every language school I've been to in Europe (except the Irish ones, which actually supports the theory) has used it extensively to help us make proper sounds. It's nice to hear that they're using it when younger as well, and it seems he just has an aversion to anything that can come across as 'ivory tower intellectual', even when it's extremely helpful to learning.

[luke]

I picked 1 but maybe could have said 2. Pronounce it Perfectly in French used IPA and other things to help the English speaker improve their French. The CDs were the most helpful part to me, but at the time I was using it, I thought it might be helpful for learning IPA. I used the book regularly, but not without the CDs.

I thought Pronounce it Perfectly in French, and its sibling for Spanish, were both good. I had an earlier edition for Spanish, and Barrons, the publisher, wasn't using IPA in that earlier edition. (Don't know if they are now).

[jeff_lindqvist]

I voted 1. This means that I don't ignore IPA, but I'm not obsessed by it either. I might take a look at a symbol used for a sound which I find confusing. ("Hmm... this is spelt 'r' but sounds more like...") It might help me with that individual sound, in isolation, but will not be of a major help when it comes to prosody.

I didn't learn to play music by reading staff notation.

[PeterMollenburg]

I rated my use of IPA as a 5. I don't use it every single day, but close. Usually it's for French, and often out of habit, just wanting to verify my assumption on the pronunciation (usually of a new word) is correct when the primary reason I'm using the dictionary is to look up a translation (FR-EN-FR dictionary) or a definition (FR monolingual dictionary), as it only takes two seconds to glance quickly at the IPA depicted next to the word. Sometimes I find variation between dictionaries when wanting to cross reference, which actually helps to understand some of the variations within standard French and how one might vary one's own pronunciation as well as understanding the relationship between vowel sounds and open and closed syllables in the language.

I'm also using IPA more heavily lately for Norwegian, being my newest language (beginner stages) with some trickier pronunciation than what I'm used to in recent years of language study.

I really appreciate IPA even for a seemingly predictable language like Spanish. Spanish isn't completely predictable at all times and it's nice to be aware of the nuances of pronunciation, such as the variation with regards to the letter 'd' in Spanish depending on where in the word it is found (beginning, middle, end) or after which letters. My latest decent hardcover Spanish dictionary has no IPA which I'm quietly annoyed about. I had a decent dictionary back in the 90s which did have IPA but someone went and lost it on me after I leant it to them . They seriously couldn't just have kept the IPA throughout their editions? (it's the same company ~25 years later). I wonder if it has been removed due to the large variation in phonetics across the Hispanic world. It would be hard to choose to base it on a Madrid accent for example when the vast majority of Spanish speakers are found in the Americas.

I also find it useful on the rare occasion for Dutch, when I discover that a 'd' might be pronounced as a 't' or 'b' as a 'p'. Learning such characteristics aids in removing tell tale signs of a Dutch speaker with foreign origins. Not that it matters! For me, I just like learning this way, but if you're not so fussy about your accent, well that's fine by me and the majority of people out there.

So why don't people learn IPA? I think as rdearman points out, some people have no idea what it is and others have no intention of becoming polyglots. Still, it remains useful even for learning one language. I'd say also that many people see it is something that's very complicated, when in actual fact it's not.

I never did a formal IPA course of sorts, and nor did I have a course that contained extensive lessons on IPA (some of French in Action touches on IPA here and there). The way I learned it, and I consider myself an average sort of (language) learner (I'm no professor, no expert), was once I learned a phoneme, for example [e] represented in French by the ending -er (eg regarder), by é in école, by -ez in allez and perhaps some others that aren't jumping out at me right now, was through association. By looking up words in the dictionary and deciphering the IPA, I'd come to realise that [e] was -er, -ez, é. Eventually, by focusing on one phoneme at a time coupled with dictionary use and course use and glancing at the IPA always, the IPA stuck. If I did any study of other languages, I'd use the IPA again and pretty quickly learn which sounds were new and what their accompanying IPA symbols were. It's not hard, it's just habit and it's highly useful in my opinion.

However, just learning IPA alone is not enough, as an earlier poster indicated and I agree with. You still have to learn what [e] sounds like, but once you've learned it, you no longer need to hear it to know when seeing [e] in a dictionary what it sounds like. This is where imitated pronunciation in some course books fails dismally. It's not standardised to the point that it is listed in dictionaries. IPA is, so when you look up a strange word that seemingly goes against predictable patterns of pronunciation (perhaps it's a loanword from English), imitated pronunciation from a course won't help you, but IPA will. You'll see it and you'll know how it sounds if you've learned IPA.

[golyplot]

I've heard of IPA, but don't use it. I haven't had much luck trying to learn pronunciation in general in the cases where I've tried.

[Nogon]

IPA is helpfull for me when I encounter an English word and am unsure of its pronunciation. I never learned IPA properly but by and by learned the symbols for the English sounds, as they are used in my English-German dictionaries.
Swedish dictionaries unfortunately don't use IPA - at least those I own do not.

[Axon]

I answered 6 because the IPA is a permanent fixture of my brain at this point when thinking about a foreign language in any way. When I hear a sound, I think of the IPA symbol. When I see an IPA symbol, I think of the sound.