Why you should learn the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)
2023 ж. 15 Нау.
15 413 Рет қаралды
#ipa #phonetics #pronunciation #accent #phonology
If you want to learn a new language, there is something that can help you to acquire a decent pronunciation much easier. It is the IPA - the International Phonetic Alphabet. The IPA transcription gives precise information to position your mouth, lips and tongue and get the sounds right.
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Please keep making videos. They're really good. You'll soon take off.
Thank you for the kind words!
θæŋk juː fɔː ðə ɡreɪt ˈvɪdɪəʊ! The IPA is a wonderful tool for learning languages. But I still believe that for many people this concept is merely inapplicable. It would take too much time for people who aren't into linguistics to learn all these characters (even for English, I don't even consider something more complicated). The answers: 1) Yes, I am! I wouldn't be able exactly to reproduce every sound (especially vowels), but I feel free reading all transcriptions in languages I learn. 2) I'm afraid of French DD
/θæŋks fɔr 'ʃɛɹɪŋ jɔɹ ɪkˈspɪɹiəns/!
I think you won't argue that learning English spelling takes significantly more effort than learning 24 English consonants and 15 vowels. Most consonants are simple, the actual problem are vowels - a total nightmare for speakers of languages that have 5 to 7 vowels (Spanish, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish etc). Learning English vowels is necessary for speaking in an understandable manner. Mastering a sound takes more effort than learning its IPA symbol. So, I don't see any reason to avoid learning the IPA for languages with complex sound system or irregular spelling.
@@AuthLingIndeed, I won’t argue. The IPA helps a lot. But I know many people who experienced a trauma learning how to read a transcription! However, it’s possible to master English spelling without a deep understanding of how it works. So… why not avoid the torture? Though I’ve also tried to teach the IPA some of such people and it was rather successful 🧐
Shouldn't it be /grejt/?
@@F_A_F123 John Wells would transcribe "great" as /greɪt/ for General American and General British. Geoff Lindsey would transcribe it as /grɛjt/ for General British. Are you aware of a convention that writes "great" as /grejt/?
I love small, high quality channels. Keep up the great work. There’s definitely an audience.
Much appreciated! I already have a long list of topics to cover.
I've been thinking about learning the IPA for some time now. Perhaps your videos will finally motivate me? We'll see.
Happy trails! I am going to make introductory videos for vowels and consonants and then dive into the details. I will mostly make videos that cover multiple languages, so they should be useful for everyone.
I love your content, looking forward to seeing more!
Another cool video about phonetics! Though I have to confess that IPA table still scares me a bit and I prefer to 'play by ear' if there is no IPA transcription for a word in the dictionary
One thing about the IPA is that the most common sounds (among European languages and perhaps most Asian ones) would have a very simple phonetical symbol - a plain letter from the basic Latin alphabet. More specific sounds (such as /ø/ or /œ/ in French and German or /ŋ/ in English and German) have less trivial symbols for a reason: most learners would have to learn these new sounds, and learning the symbol takes much less effort.
Say, I was always scared by Irish spelling and I find it harder to learn than the IPA for Irish: meabhair [mʲəuɾʲ], naomh [n̪ˠiːvˠ], bhfuil [wɪlʲ]. Irish phonology with its contrast between broad and slender (hard and soft) consonants may be nicely rendered in Cyrillic using ь, but this is probably not an option for most international students. Do you know an alternative to IPA for learners of Irish?
@@AuthLing the only alternative for IPA may be English spelling of Irish words, i.e. kil for cill, Kevin for Caoimhín etc. but of course IPA works better for this purpose 😅 and the English spelling examples are very few
Eureka! I wondered what is the origin of the name Kevin: it is Celtic!
I'm currently learning Chinese as my primary focus and Egyptian Arabic as my secondary. Both are full of very rare sounds. Chinese is very heavy in s/sh-like sounds, Arabic has many sounds involving the throat. Learning both therefore required basically full control of your whole mouths. They also have different writing systems. Pinyin can only help so much due to some allophone that isn't always reflected in the letters. The a is different when following y/i vs everything else. The e in yue, le, and meng are all different. Some sounds aren't even written, like in hui. In Arabic, there's sort of only 3 vowels, but they aren't written and they change quality after a throat consonant. Learning these without IPA would be a nightmare.
I'm curious: did you deliberately pick both of the US State Dept's top two choices of the two hardest languages to learn, or are you just a masochist? ;^)
Well I learned Spanish in highschool and in college I tried Japanese but gave up on it. A few years later I picked up French and then Swedish. I finished the Swedish course so I tried Finnish and didn't like it. Then I got serious with Chinese. After a bit I decided I didn't actually like French. I sampled Russian, learned Hangul, and settled on Arabic. My motivation for these languages comes from a few things. First, they both do interesting things with their grammar that I haven't seen in other languages. Second and more importantly, they're both used in countries with cultures that fascinated me as a child (Egypt, in the case of Arabic). Plenty of language learners can tell you your intrinsic motivation will always be so much more effective at keeping your interest and can aid in your retention.
Oh looks like I already specified Egyptian in the original post. Also noticed I got hit with an auto"correct" when I typed "s/sh"
Nightmare is a bit of an overstatement. The problem with IPA for Chinese is the same as with English as there is serious regional dialectical variation even within just Mandarin itself. Even though pinyin is imperfect its knowledge is essential, but I would also recommend serious learners to consider learning Taiwanese zhuyin, as it helps by giving a secondary phonetic door into the language.
I first learnt IPA when I tried to figure out the "b" and "p" sounds in Español since my first language do not have /b/ sound. After I'm familiar with quite a number IPA symbols and the way to produce their sounds, I found that it also help me a lot in multiple aspects. E.g. 1. Improving English pronunciation by checking the IPA transcription of a word in Cambridge dictionary. 2. To Understand different accents or dialects of a language in a linguistic way. 3. Helping other people in learning my native language (Modern Standard Madarin). There was a course that taught my friend to use pinyin, and I found that pinyin "sh" will mislead learner who is much familiar with English. English "sh" usually pronounced /ʃ/ but Mandarin pinyin "sh" usually pronounced /ʂ/ in standard accent (/ʃ/ to /s/ in Taipei accent) Currently, I'm learning another Chinese language called Fuzhou Chinese (a Eastern Min language) which shares different evolutionary paths and relations comparing to Standard Mandarin as the two languages are both mainly evolved or heavily affected by Middle Chinese. By understanding the patterns of the evolution, I can learn the phonology of Fuzhou Chinese more systematic. For example, the phonologic features of character 直 is shown as follows. Middle Chinese vs Standard Mandarin vs Fuzhou Chinese Initial consonant: /ɖ/ vs /tʂ/ vs /t/ Tone: checked tone vs light level tone vs light checked tone The rule of the evolution is that if the initial consonant and the tone of a character is voiced and checked tone in Middle Chinese, the tone will evolve to light level tone in Standard Mandarin and light checked tone in Fuzhou Chinese. Also, a character with initial consonant /ɖ/ in Middle Chinese would have initial consonant /tʂ/ or /tʂʰ/ in Standard Madarin and /t/ in Fuzhou Chinese.
Really great introduction to the IPA! I've always been a linguistics hobbyist and your video is one of the most digestible introductions to the IPA I've watched. Hope to see those videos in the future!
Thank you!
Before watching this video, I associated IPA only with beer with a high content of hop bitterness. On the other hand, I see these IPA characters when looking up words in dictionaries, only I don't know the sounds that stand for these particular characters. I studied several languages, but none of the teachers ever mentioned the IPA or showed these signs or demonstrated the sounds. I suppose Asian languages from the Far East would be a challenge for me, because as far as I know they are tonal languages. As a Polish native speaker, I have a rather trained speech apparatus and pronunciation is generally not a problem for me (cult scene from an old Polish comedy: kzhead.info/sun/dMqEisekhImJZI0/bejne.html), except for the guttural "r" in French or sometimes German. Btw. I wonder, if the IPA distinguishes the pronunciation of "r" between American English, French (a'la Edith Piaf) or Polish ? When it comes to spelling, English is probably the most difficult language - it requires frequent contact with the written word to get by. Asian languages such as Chinese or Japanese are probably a separate category, but I have no knowledge in this area.
Regarding the R sounds - it does! For literally any sounds that are different there is a way to write them down in a unique way in IPA. So the American r is ɹ or ɻ depending on the speaker, the polish (or Italian for example) r is just r, the Spanish r in pero is ɾ, ABW the Edith Piaf r is ʀ, the German r is mostly ʁ or ʁ̥, though it is r in some dialects. That’s the beauty of IPA, you can precisely describe any sound that exists in human languages. Sometimes when it comes to vowels, it’s a bit hard to pinpoint exactly which cardinal vowel is the vowel the closest to. So in Polish in być can be transcribed as ɨ̞ or ɪ̙. This is by the way how you see that it’s ~almost~ the same as the vowel in English “bit”, which is ɪ (in American English)
Thank you ❤
This channel satisfies my huge interest in languages, thank you so much for these video's :D
My pleasure! Are there any particular topics or languages that you are interested in?
@@AuthLing Slavonistics, the Greenlandic language and its phonology and the IPA alphabet :)
Great, then you will watch an interesting video soon.
@@AuthLing I'm sure i'll enjoy the video! Can't wait to see the notification on my phone 😊
This was taught in the Philippines in the 70s at a 3rd year high school level. The course is called Voice & Diction.
i have to say this is a really good video from a really small channel. Hope you get big soon!
I hope so too! Thanks for watching!
I love your videos
Happy to hear that! Greetings from Australia!
you got yourself a new sub
Glad to see you here!
I wish language courses would use this
Great video. My degree is in linguistics, and I used to be very familiar with the IPA, to the point of being able to take lecture notes in it, often mixed with regular English, Spanish, abbreviations of both, plus medical notation, absolutely seamlessly - but alas, my 45th reunion is this year, and with the passage of so much time, the IPA has almost completely fled my mind. I've been looking for a quickie way to refresh my memory, so you have a new subscriber. BTW, the word "pronunciation" is pronounced with that "u" as a u sound, like the word "nun", not the "ounce" sound you give it. Sorry, my IPA is just too rusty. It's pronOUNCE, but pronUNciation. Super common error for learners of ESL despite the fact that at least in this instance, the pronunciation *is* exactly as both words are spelled.
Thanks your comment! I am glad that you enjoyed my video. Phonetics is my true passion in linguistics, so there will be much more videos about it.
This is really interesting that many native speakers of English perceive my "proNUNciation" as /naʊn/ rather than /nʌn/. I've checked vowel formats in Praat and I have an explanation. I have an open central vowel here: [nän]. Americans expect either a schwa [nən] "nun" or a closing diphthong [næʊn] (more typical for Americans) or [näʊn] (more typical for Englishmen). They perceive my open [ä] as a start of [äʊ], but my vowel actually stays open - it never goes to the closed [ʊ]. At the same time, I pronounce /aʊ/ as [æʊ]. This is why I did not perceive my pro[nän]ciation as pro/naʊn/ciation when I was proof-listening my recording.
One more example of different interpretation of the same physical sound came to my mind. Canadian raising turns /aʊ/ into [ʌʊ] in the word about, but some Americans may perceive it as a variation of /u/ and claim that Canadians say "about" as "a boot". However, Canadians do not have problems telling between their "about" [ə'bʌʊt] and "a boot" [ə'but].
@@AuthLing Sorry, dude, you absolutely did pronounce it exactly the same as “pronounce,” no matter what you “perceive,” no matter how you spell what you *think* you said. Sorry, I can’t do IPA on my phone, nor can I copy and paste while replying. I’m a native speaker of English, and not deaf, and I’m pretty aware of what I’m hearing - and what it *should* be. And this one is the same in both American and British English - both words are pronounced exactly as they are spelled.
@@wendyannhI played the fragment, when he says the word in question, and the vowel there definitely sounds like an [ɐ] or a somewhat lower schwa, and nothing like an [aʊ] diphthong. And the realisation of the STRUT (/ʌ/) vowel as [ɐ] is perfectly fine in many variants of English. And also, Alexei (the author of the video) did measure the objective characteristics of the segment (to use the neutral phonetic term) in question, and the results prove, that it is, in fact, not a diphthong. And you need not to be this prescriptive about the language.
Looks like a great beginning of an IPA related series! :) I'd be excited on next ones. Thank you for the video! Hope it's not to private question: your accent sound like German or Austrian for me, how far is my guess from reality? Thank you again!
Thank you! I have a long list of topics to cover. My native languages are Russian and Ukrainian, but I do speak German.
@@AuthLing where did you study linguistics or learned about it?:)
Oh, that's a long story! It all began from studying Italian for fun, then I've added Spanish because I had a trip to Spain. It was natural to study linguistics at that time to systematize my knowledge. I may make a video about that some time later.
@@AuthLing wow, even in "without IPA" example I didn't recognize Russian/Ukrainian accent, даже не смотря на то что сам також розмовляю цими двома мовами :). Nice job keep going!
bilabial trill go brrrr
I'm speaking 4 languages (all indo-european, 2 slavic and 2 germanic ones) I haven't studied grammar or had knowledge of IPA (until now). I'm able to speak all 4 without a problem and also write without making mistakes. It's not necessary to know either but it makes language learning (and speaking) process easier and faster I guess.
I had a quite hard time understanding it like i remembered some sounds but I didn't know what bilabial or stop meant, but I once noticed a patern and BANG I was able to pronounce palatal stop or pharyngeal fricatives. It helps me a lot with conlanging but i have trouble transcribing english to ipa
Well that was a fun, if too short, video. I've thought about learning IPA but it does seem difficult. After 3 years of haphazard study of Korean, I'm just now beginning to read syllable-by-syllable instead of letter-by-letter. The world's only constructed alphabet is in fact a real jewel worth the effort of learning, imo. So, does the IPA capture the physiological elements of consonants truly well enough to learn pronunciation just from physical instructions? I'm having a hard time with some of the Korean consonants that are jut to close to English ones like 'j' and 'ch' -- the differences are pretty subtle, I guess, because I'm having a hard time sounding 'correct', ie, not like an American. But in the end, it seems to me that there are probably hundreds of sounds in the world's languages that I would have to work to be able to pronounce well. Learning just the subset in Korean has been hard enough. I don't think I have the wherewithal to learn _all_ of them from all the world over! I mean, what about all the clicks and such from African languages? Those are there, too, I assume. That just sounds like a nightmare!
There is a guy I follow on YT who uses IPA for isopropyl alcohol 😂 Phonetics though, love it! As a language teacher it's very useful.
😁 I was very surprised to discover that IPA can also stand for the India Pale Ale since it was always the alphabet for me.
For American English, it's "plow", "hiccup", "loch"; example pronunciations for "ough" would be "rough", "bough", "through", "though", "thought", "cough"
I'm familiar with IPA's existance, not so much with it's exact rules. Also yeah, I'm currently trying to learn French and the letters 'e', 'é' and 'è' confuse me a lot. Not even that I can't hear the difference but rather because it's tricky to pronounce them correctly every time. The omnipresent combinations of 'o', 'u', 'e' and 'a' also keep me asking myself how I'm supposed to pronounce them. Like how exactly do I pronounce 'manteau'? I can hear that it's not my 'o' right at the end but I can't figure out how to get the right sound. Is there an actual difference between 'elle' and 'elles' if the next word doesn't start with a vowel? French is tough to speak.
French is a language that actually motivates many people to learn the IPA. Letter è is for the open /ɛ/ sound like in Polish "sen". Letter é is for the closed /e/ sound like in Polish "dzień" (i.e. between soft consonants). Letter e is for /ɛ/ or /ə/ depending on its position (closed or open syllable), and it's really getting complicated here.
You are absolutely right that the last vowel sound in manteau is different from the Polish "o". Actually, the IPA spells them differently: /o/ in manteau vs /ɔ/ in dom. The French /o/ is in the middle between Polish "u" and "o". I will cover that in the next videos. Good luck learning French!
@@AuthLing thanks
Vowels are harder to distinguish than consonants. For example the difference between /a/ and /æ/ is hard for me.
vowels are so cool esp when u get into diphthongs and glides, there are even "voiceless vowels" described in the literature
Can you do Kashubian language? please
I will think about it! I can make a video about Slavic languages that have less than 1 mln speakers: Kashubian, Sorbian, Rusyn etc.
@@AuthLing sure! But remember Kashubians are Pomeranians and are Slavic
Oh, nice. Phonetically consistent alphabet... Something czechs had ever since forever.
Why learn it? Easy! You need to pass linguistics 101
I really struggle with the german /ç/ or just ch, it sometimes sounds like russian щ, but sometimes it sounds like /x/
Do you struggle with the pronunciation itself or with choosing the actual sound spelled as CH? - [x] is used after u, o, a (back vowels and a); - [ç] is used after i, e, ä, ü, y, ö (front vowels). [ç] is similar to the Russian хь and equivalent to the voiceless й as in тихий.
@@AuthLing Thank you so much for this advice, I struggle with pronouncing /ç/
@@AuthLing I think you meant voiceless х in тихий, because й has a different sound
@@F_A_F123 хь[x̟] is a more retracted sound than [ç]. The Russian /j/ can be emphatically realized as a fricative [ʝ] or as a devoiced fricative [ç] (e.g., at the end of the word). See Yanushevskaya and Bunčić.
@@AuthLing I'm russian and I think I don't do this
I am trying but it is too hard
Could you describe what gives you difficulties? Which language are you studying?
IPA forced me to confront my perception of my native language and fully destroyed my previous 26 years of life, I can't support it any longer
It is prəˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃən bro not prəˈnaʊnsiˈeɪʃən.😉
I said it as pro[nän]ciation but it is quite possible that you perceived it as pro[naʊn]ciation. Please see my discussion with wendyannh. It is normal that your phonological hearing is different from mine. One more example of different interpretations of the same sound. Canadian raising turns /aʊ/ into [ʌʊ] in the word about, but some Americans may perceive it as a variation of /u/ and claim that Canadians say "about" as "a boot". However, Canadians do not have problems telling between their "about" [ə'bʌʊt] and "a boot" [ə'but].
Так ты русскоговорящий? Зашибись, а я и не понял
Он австралийский
The problem with IPA is it's "international" only by name. The further sound is from French or English the harder it is to write that down. (K Klein discusses it in his video "The worst lunguage refor ever", link below)" Personally speaking, IPA is last thing I would use to learn how to pronouce things. kzhead.info/sun/Y5SFk8iwjXyXm5E/bejne.html
Sure, the IPA is very euro-centric but how does that affect the IPA's usefulness in learning pronunciation? Also, I feel like English is a lot harder to transcribe than many other languages.
@@wojwesoly >Sure, the IPA is very euro-centric but how does that affect the IPA's usefulness in learning pronunciation? It's not eurocentric. In case of Europe, IPA already fails at slavic, ugrofinik and nordic lunguages. Hell, i'm not even sure if IPA can accuretly represent all dialects and accents from Brittish Isles. Also, how does IPA help at all ? First you need to learn it, and that think is complicated as shit, and then apply, wich demands having IPA-{choosen lunguage} dictionary. In time you need to learn IPA you can easly learn to pronouce things. IPA, in best case scenario, will help learn pronounciation but ONLY in anglo and latin spheres, and I personally think that only French is hard enought to learn IPA for it. For other lunguages IPA will fail and not help at all. There is a reason IPA is not taught in schools ; it's too hard and too limited to provide meaningfull learning aid.
@@juleksz.5785 in which century do you live? So many dictionaries provide IPA transcriptions! It’s not a problem at all. “Complicated as shit” - you do NOT have to learn all the characters for using it, as there is no language that uses all of them. Mostly you have to get only general principles. As far as I know, the IPA is able to reproduce dialects from Isles. But even if it isn’t, it is still applicable for every language. Finally, the IPA can’t fail. But non-diligent learners do.
@@illia47 >So many dictionaries provide IPA transcriptions .... Exept the online ones ones I use ? And the paper ones in my schools, so far ? I literally checked 4 most popular dictionary sites adn only 1 used IPA. All despite the fact that IPA is 200 years old. >you do NOT have to learn all the characters for using it, as there is no language that uses all of them ..... So what ? I do not understand your point here. If i'm not suppose to learn signs outside my target lunguage then why would I use IPA anyway if there are eighter better phonetic systems for that target lungage or using using them won't be any aid ? >But even if it isn’t, it is still applicable for every language ... Yeah, i said it myself. Just as I said that the least similar the lunguage is to English or French the least optimal and more convoluted IPA gets. Slavic lunguages are great examples as you could simply write phoneticly in Cyrylic or Latin alphabet words from most European lunguages, and people would still could esaly learn to pronounce them. That's actually how teachers in lower grades teach how to pronounce things in Polish schools. >Finally, the IPA can’t fail. IPA cannot fail as long as you learnt it by hearth. Same could be told about any other phonetical alphabet. But there still better tools than IPA. >But non-diligent learners do. What does not using impractical system have to do with being non diligent ? Especially when there are better methods to learn/teach pronounciation than IPA ?
@@juleksz.5785"... Exept the online ones I use?" [sic] Most respectable online dictionaries use IPA transcriptions nowadays. > "Slavic lunguages are great examples as you could simply write phonetically in Cyrylic or Latin alphabets words from most European languages [...] That's actually how teachers in lower grades teach in Polish schools" Teach whom and which language? Teach young Poles Polish, which they already knew? English (or any foreign language) is taught based on resources in that language, not by "writing phonetically in Cyrylic or Latin". > "Just as I said that the least similar the lunguage is to English or French the least optimal and more convoluted IPA gets." But it doesn't get convoluted. > "IPA cannot fail as long as you learnt it by hearth." You do not need to learn the general IPA chart in its entirety. Furthermore, you don't even need to learn the symbols to know the IPA, you only need to understand its structure to know it. Symbols will change depending on language being transcribed. > "Especially when there are better methods..." What are they? Show at least one.
genuinely, please don't use IPA (as you described it) to learn pronunciation there is so much more to it than that, literal babies listen to native speakers & they become native speakers & they can't even read
jɛs ˈvɛri ɡʊd ˈvɪdɪjo 😊
Just a note for non-native speakers of English: We don't usually say 'the IPA'. We just say, e.g., 'IPA is a useful tool' in the indefinite form 👍🏻 Another note is that 'pronounciation' is usually pronounced /pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/ (with no diphthongs hiding in there)!
You might want to update the Wikipedia article. It usually uses an article: "the IPA". The IPA does not usually have separate letters ... ...marks in the IPA. The IPA is designed... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
I am saying "pronunciation" as [pʰɹəˌnɐn.siˈeɪ.ʃən] here. If you hear "noun" here, you might want to use Praat to see that your perception is wrong.
@@AuthLingI wasn't aiming these comments at you! You can feel free to pronounce and do things your way :) It was just for the general knowledge of the audience. Anyway, I'm happy to check that on Praat for you later! No problem. But I'm afraid, regardless the phonetic value of your vowel (which I really don't think will turn out to be schwa), the 'pronunciation' in the opening line is clearly perceived with a diphthong (I'm a native speaker). The issue might be that the nasal is causing raising? Maybe have a listen again and work on that if it bothers you :) Curious! It's a common enough mistake, though, so many people outside linguistics won't even notice! You don't need worry about it! Regarding IPA, we certainly do not use the definite article in British universities, haha. It sounds rather stilted and non-native (remember that Wikipedia often sounds unnatural/non-native due to the nature of its editing) 🙏🏻 It might well be that some other Anglophone countries use the definite article (but I haven't encountered that in academia). Anyway, well done on making your videos! It's sad that our field is so underrepresented!! Good to see people making an effort 👍🏻
Interesting, very interesting! I've checked several books: the IPA handbook, "The sounds of the world's languages" by Ladefoged and Maddieson and "Gimson's pronunciation of English" by Alan Cruttenden. All these books always write that as "the IPA". Note that Ladefoged, Maddieson and Cruttenden are British and their book were printed in Great Britain. To be honest with you, I find this article pretty annoying because I perceive IPA as a personal name that doesn't need an article.
I am not asking you to provide links that prove your words because KZhead silently removes comments with URLs. It treats them as spam.