Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

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badger
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby badger » Fri May 27, 2022 12:18 pm

I see that there is an IPA version of Alice in Wonderland, or ˈaelɪs ɪn ˈwndərˌaeænd, available in print. does anyone know of any other texts in IPA, particularly in other languages (& extra particularly in French) ?
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Sprachprofi » Fri May 27, 2022 1:48 pm

tungemål wrote:Consonants can be even harder to get right, if you can't relate them to something.
Example: the /ɕ/ is a "voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative" and is used in some languages. How to produce it:
wikipedia wrote:- the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth in the area behind the alveolar ridge (the gum line).
- tongue shape is laminal, meaning that it is the tongue blade that contacts the roof of the mouth.
- the middle of the tongue is bowed and raised towards the hard palate.

I don't know about you, but I couldn't learn a sound based on this description. I understood this sound only after learning that it's very similar to a sound that exists in Norwegian: /ç/ normally written "kj". By the way, the /ç/ is a rare sound in the world and some say that it's disappearing from Norwegian. Most young people can't pronounce it.


I wouldn't try to learn a new consonant from this description either, but rather by referring to the consonant chart and then use triangulation:
1. Locate the consonant I need to learn, let's say /ɕ/
2. Locate a consonant that I know and that is in the same column, e.g. /j/ (y as in year)
3. Locate a consonant that I know and that is in the same row, e.g. /s/
4. Hold the same mouth and tongue position as for 2) but change my mode of articulation to be like 3). Confirm I got it right by listening to the audio.

English and German have a fairly good sound inventory, so cases are rare that I don't know ANY consonant in the same column, but it happened when I first learned /q/ for Arabic. In order to learn it, I produce the nearest consonant I know (here: /k/) and then modify it to accommodate the difference (uvular rather than velar, i.e. further back).
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby lowsocks » Sat May 28, 2022 6:48 pm

badger wrote:I see that there is an IPA version of Alice in Wonderland, or ˈaelɪs ɪn ˈwndərˌaeænd, available in print. does anyone know of any other texts in IPA, particularly in other languages (& extra particularly in French) ?
The following may be of some use, though they are not complete novels:

1) The works of Paul Passy (1859-1940), on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=cr ... 20Passy%29

In particular, "Le français parlé" has texts in phonetic transcription, with facing pages in standard French orthography. (There are a few scans, some better than others.)

One problem, though, is that these editions were published in the 1880's and 1890's, so they do not use modern IPA. However, Passy was the founder of the International Phonetics Association, and was involved in the early development of the IPA. So hopefully it is not too difficult to understand his transcriptions.

(There is also the issue that both the French language and social customs may have changed since then. I don't know if this would create any great difficulties.)

2) "Newson's first French book":
https://archive.org/details/newsonsfirstfren00alge

An elementary book from 1901. Phonetic transcriptions of the first 36 lessons are on pages 175 to 196.

3) "Le Français Par La Méthode Nature", by Arthur Jensen, c. 1950's.

This is widely available, e.g., on the Internet Archive (here and here). Text is in standard French orthography, with an interlinear phonetic transcription.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby s_allard » Sat May 28, 2022 8:35 pm

I also find IPA very useful for languages where the alphabet or the orthography is very challenging, such as is the case with Russian. French and English have difficult spelling systems but they are not a problem for me. I don’t use IPA at all with Spanish and Italian.

I think that mention should be made of the difference between a phonemic and a phonetic transcription. Most of the time here we are talking about phonemic transcription in which we are describing the phonemes of the target language. We can also produce a narrow transcription that describes more accurately what is being said.

Although I do use IPA where necessary and highly recommend it, we have to be aware of its limitations. It is difficult to accurately transcribe suprasegmental or prosodic features such rhythm, timing, meter, and stress at the word and sentence level.

And then there is the whole question of how do people really talk in continuous informal speech where certain phonemes or allophones can totally disappear or blend with neighbouring sounds. We know that native speakers spontaneously reconstruct the missing elements. If you have ever tried to transcribe spontaneous conversation, you are certainly aware of this.

I would be remiss to not point out that we are truly living in a a golden age of language learning. With a few clicks we have rapid access to all sounds of so many languages, something that books could never provide with all that opaque terminology of articulatory phonology.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Axon » Sun May 29, 2022 6:37 pm

badger wrote:I see that there is an IPA version of Alice in Wonderland, or ˈaelɪs ɪn ˈwndərˌaeænd, available in print. does anyone know of any other texts in IPA, particularly in other languages (& extra particularly in French) ?


The academic journal "Le Maître Phonétique" published articles in then-current IPA at the turn of the 20th century, many of them in French (some by the aforementioned Paul Passy). JSTOR has them, and you can sign up with an email to read 100 articles per month free even if you don't have JSTOR access elsewhere. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40200087
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby badger » Mon May 30, 2022 1:14 pm

lowsocks wrote:...
Axon wrote:...

thank you both :)
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby tsuyoshi » Tue Jun 07, 2022 2:56 am

Sprachprofi wrote:The International Phonetic Alphabet can describe the sounds of any language, so you literally just learn it once and then use it for every language for the rest of your life - a great investment.


Doing a little bit of looking around on some languages I'm interested in (Japanese and Chinese)... There is an IPA dictionary for Japanese (https://www.cjk.org/data/japanese/nlp/japanese-phonetic-database/), but it does not seem to be available to the public. It seems like Mandarin can not be completely represented in the IPA (https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/keating/Keating_2018_PCCtalk.pdf). I'm not an expert on this at all, but as far as I can tell, you need to hear a native speak the language to get some aspects of the pronunciation that the IPA cannot encode in these languages. Since you need native audio anyway... and you need to learn the writing system that the natives use in their own dictionaries, which, in the case of Japanese and Chinese at least, is not the IPA, what's the point?

It does seem like a lot of English and French dictionaries use the IPA, so it would definitely be useful for those languages. I guess it could be especially useful for those two, because the pronunciation does not correspond to the spelling very consistently.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Dragon27 » Tue Jun 07, 2022 4:03 am

tsuyoshi wrote:Since you need native audio anyway... and you need to learn the writing system that the natives use in their own dictionaries, which, in the case of Japanese and Chinese at least, is not the IPA, what's the point?

You don't have to have a dictionary with direct representation of every word ('s phonemic composition) in IPA. My favorite English language dictionary is AHD. It does not transcribe its words in IPA, it uses its own phonetical transcription system. And many dictionaries of other languages do the same thing. It does not matter. I study the language phonology in IPA (CanIPA, to be more accurate) and the way the dictionary's phone(m)tic transcription corresponds to IPA (or, for languages with phonetic orthography, like Japanese, the letter-phoneme correspondence). And I need to study how the phonemic representation transforms into the actual phones (sounds) in the dialects/accents I'm interested in with all the relevant phonetic phenomena (assimilation, etc.) anyway. IPA is a common denominator, the universal phonem/tic language. As such, I use it all the time, even if not directly.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Sprachprofi » Thu Jun 09, 2022 8:11 pm

I have now written a continuation of the intro to IPA, find it at https://languagecrush.com/forum/t/3417 :)
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby SpanishInput » Thu Jun 09, 2022 10:29 pm

Hi! I'm surprised that easypronunciation.com has not yet be mentioned in this thread. Very useful for quickly checking the pronunciation of a few words.

Of course, as has been pointed out, transcriptions are sometimes not fully phonetic. For example, books for American English pronunciation, even those that include the full IPA chart in one of the first pages, will still use t̬ for the alveolar tap in their "phonetic" transcriptions, which is very non-standard usage (that diacritic means "voiced", so t̬ actually means [d]) and unnecessarily confusing for foreign learners. The standard symbol is [ɾ]. Those books also use [r] (the Spanish trill) to represent [ɹ] (the English approximant rhotic), and some even transcribe ɛ˞ (An ɹ-colored vowel) as [ɛr], which means [ɛ] + a Spanish trill. I'm suspecting Americans really have something against international standards (Celsius, meters, Kg, and proper IPA usage).

In the easypronunciation.com website, you have to tick all the boxes in the advanced options to make sure you get proper phonetic transcriptions of Standard American English.

As a side not, the Spanish IPA transcriptor in this website is loosely based on "Manual de fonética y fonología españolas", by Prof. J. Halvor Clegg and published by Routledge. It does deviate a bit from the usual Spanish transcriptions you'll see in Wikipedia and the official recommendations of the RAE. For example, Prof. Clegg claims that in certain contexts /e/ is pronounced as [ɛ], and this is (mostly) reflected in the easypronunciation.com transcription tool. However, my own recordings analyzed with Praat show this is very inconsistent. That's why Gabe from Fluent Forever always transcribes the Spanish /e/ as [e] in this word lists.
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