learn the IPA

I already know most of the ones used for English as it’s very similar to the system my students used to learn English which I used to have to teach. I’m more interested in the ones for sounds not used in English. I think IPA is useful for learning about the different possible sounds. It’s already helped me to differentiate sounds that I previously wouldn’t have noticed were different, e.g. clear vs. dark l and aspirated vs. unaspirated t/p/k.

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.

The IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet. It covers mainly Western Europe and American vocal sounds. I think it is a good start to sculpted singing as well as speaking foreign languages properly.

Well, I learned it not so much profit… but I have had a few linguistics classes since it is a point of interest.

There are books out there that you can read on the topic, if you are near a unviersity, I’d encourage you to at least hit up their book store and look up which classes they have in formal linguistics and what books they are currently using.

Using flash cards and taking some time out per day to review it will keep it fresh and make it pretty easy.

The best part about knowing the IPA? Morphological analysis.

drool

:)