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/