Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

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Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Sprachprofi » Thu May 26, 2022 7:26 am

I'm always amazed at the number of polyglots who cannot read even basic IPA. 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.

Here's a quick intro: https://languagecrush.com/forum/t/3416
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu May 26, 2022 8:35 am

Sprachprofi wrote:I'm always amazed at the number of polyglots who cannot read even basic IPA. 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.

Here's a quick intro: https://languagecrush.com/forum/t/3416


I (almost) completely agree. IPA has helped me produce a more native-like accent by improving accuracy on imitating phonemes and clarifying the pronunciation (via the IPA in dictionaries) of words requiring further investigation. Thanks for sharing, Sprachprofi.

The part I disagree on is learning it (the entire IPA) once and you will no longer struggle with pronunciation with whichever languages you choose to learn...

...I think it's a better use of learning time, ie more effecient, to learn the IPA as it relates to each language as you learn them. Why learn the IPA representing phonemes that you don't use, found in languages you're not actively learning and might never learn?

It's a minor point nonetheless. All in all IPA is a powerful tool surprisingly under utilised by language learners.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby rdearman » Thu May 26, 2022 9:35 am

Sprachprofi wrote:I'm always amazed at the number of polyglots who cannot read even basic IPA. 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.

Here's a quick intro: https://languagecrush.com/forum/t/3416

I suspect that a lot of the reason people don't do that initially is because they start out only wanting to learn one language. They don't actually plan to be multilingual, so they only worry about the pronunciation of one other language. Also, most beginners wouldn't have a clue what IPA is! Oh sure, they see the funny looking text near a word in the dictionary, but really don't know what it represents.

Knowing resistor band colouring will help you instantly identify the resistance to the flow of electricity in a ceramic register, and it is mandatory for a career in electronics manufacture, but it won't help you if all you want to do is repair your radio. :)

It is a completely different story if you sit down one day and decide you're going to learn 50 languages before you die. Although most of those people never seem to get past the first one.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Le Baron » Thu May 26, 2022 3:09 pm

I rather dispute some of the cavalier claims made (and in that language crush post).

Using English examples in order to discuss sounds is tricky also because regional accents vary so strongly. The IPA can be used as a gold standard.

Which 'gold standard'? It seems like this promotes a particular sound system as the 'gold standard', which I assume is RP English. Yet in fact even the so-called RP system in England isn't spoken with the same sounds everywhere. So which one is the right one?

On the chart for œ/ɶ both could represent a word like cœur in French (the first one is employed to represent the sound for IPA). The addition of the 'u' changes the sound anyway, so the IPA doesn't really help or actually assist you in knowing how to hold your mouth/toungue for that sound.

I'm not saying the IPA doesn't 'work', that would be absurd, but it still relies upon the ability of the individual to see and hear and reproduce sounds and that's the same problem between seeing/hearing a representative sound without using the IPA.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Sprachprofi » Thu May 26, 2022 4:43 pm

PeterMollenburg wrote:I (almost) completely agree. IPA has helped me produce a more native-like accent by improving accuracy on imitating phonemes and clarifying the pronunciation (via the IPA in dictionaries) of words requiring further investigation. Thanks for sharing, Sprachprofi.

The part I disagree on is learning it (the entire IPA) once and you will no longer struggle with pronunciation with whichever languages you choose to learn...

...I think it's a better use of learning time, ie more effecient, to learn the IPA as it relates to each language as you learn them. Why learn the IPA representing phonemes that you don't use, found in languages you're not actively learning and might never learn?


I actually agree. The full IPA is useful for people who know they want to study a lot of languages, but even if you only want to learn one foreign language, you should learn the symbols that are used for that language, in order to be able to produce these sounds more accurately, be able to look up the pronunciation of words you don't know, and liberate yourself from the spelling. Keep in mind that even in relatively phonetic languages like German, the spelling can be a source of bad pronunciation, e.g. all the foreigners who pronounce "Amerikaner" (and other nationalities) with an -er ending when it's actually /ɐ/.

Using English examples in order to discuss sounds is tricky also because regional accents vary so strongly. The IPA can be used as a gold standard.

Which 'gold standard'? It seems like this promotes a particular sound system as the 'gold standard', which I assume is RP English. Yet in fact even the so-called RP system in England isn't spoken with the same sounds everywhere. So which one is the right one?


Sorry, I don't follow.

The IPA has nothing to do with RP English, in fact it was first devised for French. (In my explanations I may have occasionally assumed RP pronunciation of some words simply because it's the English I was taught, but IPA is not tied to RP English.)

Since the IPA represents sounds, not spelling, the pronunciation of words in different dialects will be spelled differently in IPA, see e.g. here. This means that if your native language is English and you do not intend to learn any foreign language, you would still use IPA in order to read/write about the differences in pronunciation between dialects. Example from the Wikipedia article on Australian English: "unstressed /ɪ/ is merged into /ə/ (schwa)".

IPA is also commonly used to represent idiolects, i.e. an individual's actual pronunciation. Entire conversations are transcribed faithfully into IPA in order to analyse phenomena like for example the influence of family / native place and current location on an individual's pronunciation. If limited to the Latin alphabet, you could never represent how people speak in enough detail because the letters are ambiguous.

On the chart for œ/ɶ both could represent a word like cœur in French (the first one is employed to represent the sound for IPA). The addition of the 'u' changes the sound anyway, so the IPA doesn't really help or actually assist you in knowing how to hold your mouth/toungue for that sound.


The IPA for cœur is /kœʁ/ - and no, the u does not change anything. IPA is especially helpful in understanding what is going on in non-phonetic languages like French, e.g.:
sa /sa/
son /sɔ̃/
sonne /sɔn/
sonné /sɔ.ne/
sonnais /sɔ.nɛ/
sonnait /sɔ.nɛ/
sceau /so/
sceaux /so/
sans /sɑ̃/
sans abri /sɑ̃.z‿a.bʁi/
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Le Baron » Thu May 26, 2022 4:58 pm

Sprachprofi wrote:Sorry, I don't follow.

The IPA has nothing to do with RP English, in fact it was first devised for French. (In my explanations I may have occasionally assumed RP pronunciation of some words simply because it's the English I was taught, but IPA is not tied to RP English.)

If you're quoting me, you need to leave my name in or I can't see that I've been quoted!. Since you don't follow, I'll assist...

I didn't say it was tied to RP English, I was referring to what that post said on languagecrush. The quote I took explicitly references it in regard to English as an example. That's what I addressed.

Sprachprofi wrote:IPA is also commonly used to represent idiolects, i.e. an individual's actual pronunciation. Entire conversations are transcribed faithfully into IPA in order to analyse phenomena like for example the influence of family / native place and current location on an individual's pronunciation.

Represent is a good word. It means exactly what the word represent means. There will be dispute about whether it represents it accurately. Which means it isn't the IPA system in doubt, but whether the sounds assigned to a certain sound system in an accent/dialect/ideolect... are accurate. I don't think that some of the IPA sounds are fully reflective of the sound systems in some language, especially how they alter when combined into words.

Sprachprofi wrote:The IPA for cœur is /kœʁ/ - and no, the u does not change anything. IPA is especially helpful in understanding what is going on in non-phonetic languages like French.

Yes, I know what the IPA for cœur is, I stated that it uses œ. The 'u' absolutely changes the sound in that word by appending a brief 'schwa' sound. It's a diphthong. I was also saying that the word isn't said in in one perfect way, not even by adjoining regions. I understand perfectly that the sound system represented will be the one seen as dominant in a particular language.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Dragon27 » Thu May 26, 2022 5:10 pm

Le Baron wrote:Yes, I know what the IPA for cœur is, I stated that it uses œ. The 'u' absolutely changes the sound in that word by appending a brief 'schwa' sound. It's a diphthong.

Is it also a diphthong in 'œuf' or 'bœuf'?
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby tractor » Thu May 26, 2022 5:36 pm

I find IPA very helpful. One obvious benefit is that it's a standardized system, unlike those English based pronunciation guides, where there seems to be a different system for every language course published.

However, IPA is not as unambiguous as one might imagine. Both narrow and broad transcriptions are possible. /r/ can be used to represent both the r in the English word trap and the r in Spanish trapo. For English, there are currently two different IPA transcription schemes (Gimson and Upton) commonly used in dictionaries published in the UK.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Le Baron » Thu May 26, 2022 5:45 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
Le Baron wrote:Yes, I know what the IPA for cœur is, I stated that it uses œ. The 'u' absolutely changes the sound in that word by appending a brief 'schwa' sound. It's a diphthong.

Is it also a diphthong in 'œuf' or 'bœuf'?

For some probably. But then French pronunciation isn't consistent between similarly spelled words anyway.
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Re: Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Postby Dragon27 » Thu May 26, 2022 6:20 pm

Le Baron wrote:For some probably.

Are these exactly the same 'some' people who have a diphthong in 'cœur'?
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