I would really like to learn the IPA with all of its nuances… including the diacritics and suprasegmentals. In order to achieve this goal, I am taking a phonetics course this coming fall quarter at the University of Washington. To get extra practice, I bought a dialect manual from paulmeier.com, which covers 24 different English dialects using IPA transcriptions.
This is an amazing book that I would highly recommend. It is called: Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen and it comes with 12 cds. It cost me $110 and Paul provides great online resources for the IPA and audio of real-life speakers.
I’m no actress, but being a linguist, it seems important to know about how phonetic speech sounds apply in real-life for real speakers. So far, I have worked on the Russian accent and the South Boston accent and have had great fun velarizing my L’s.
