How does one "learn IPA" ?

[kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com]

@futurebird Find examples of words transcribed by people speaking roughly the same variety of English as you do, and match symbol to sound. That will get you the basics quickly.

[Guest]

@futurebird@sauropods.win ˈlæŋɡwɪdʒɪz

[Guest]

@futurebird@sauropods.win i kinda just learned ipa by . interacting with it a bunch ? reading transcriptions of languages im familiar with, slowly starting to associate sounds with symbols

[Guest]

@futurebird@sauropods.win also really important to understand the systematicity - understand what place and manner of articulation mean and how the symbols relate to them

[Guest]

@abuseofnotation @futurebird The word was disseminated in a play by a Czech playright. R. U. R. and coined by his brother.

(Not saying that changes the pronunciation of the 'o'.)

Robot - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

[yomimono@wandering.shop]

@futurebird I learned with flash cards as part of a linguistics class many years ago. IMO the hard part is all the sounds you’ve never used as part of a language before. It’s hard to get my brain to even hear them properly, let alone remember them, and distinguishing them is extremely difficult. Some of them I can produce correctly because I know what my mouth is supposed to do, but I can’t tell them apart from other sounds when I hear them.

[writeblankspace@plasmatrap.com]

@futurebird@sauropods.win just find some words and transcribe them yourself, then find their actual IPA and listen to the audio

The wikipedia page is also so cool. It has recordings for all the IPA sounds and describes how they are made.

[Guest]

@abuseofnotation @futurebird it's not russian, it's Czech.

Robota is the Czech word for corvée labour, and it's pronounced rowbuta.

Karel Čapek first used the noun form in his play, Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots), from 1920.

The best pronunciation of the word in  Čapek's concept in popular culture is Dr. Zoidberg in Futurama.

[kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com]

@futurebird I don't know how much this has actually influenced the pronunciation of the word, but it's possible that the truncated form _bot_ — always pronounced with an unreduced vowel — has influenced how people pronounce the original long form.

(No American is ever going to produce anything like the original Czech pronunciation without extensive practice, though, of course.)

[klara@drupal.community]

@futurebird I like to learn with examples like songs or so. Then I thought about this dutch linguists poem that includes all the difficulties in english pronunciation, and I thought, if you know IPA, it isn't difficult anymore.
So, yes there exists a transcription in IPA for "the chaos" (see link in the text after the video). But I need some more learning too.

The Chaos Poem: A Guide to IPA and English Pronunciation

Learning English can be challenging, particularly in regards to pronunciation due to its irregularities. Gerard Nolst Trenité's poem "The Chaos" highlights these complexities. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) serves as a helpful tool for language learners, providing a consistent way to understand pronunciation. Mastering the IPA can enhance one's English speaking skills.

Fern's English (fernsenglish.com)

[fritzoids@mas.to]

@kechpaja @futurebird

seconding the part where you learn the sounds and their transcription based on a language / dialect you are familiar with. No need (yet) to learn sounds that are not part of the language you're listening to.
Then expand from there.
Also listening to people talk and transcribing what you hear is just, like many things, something that gets easier the more you practice.

Here's a quick chart of the main phonemes used in American English
https://oercommons.org/authoring/53192-ipa-chart-american-english/view

[greenskyoverme@ohai.social]

@futurebird Here we learn (a subset of) it in fifth grade together with learning English, and then more characters in French class in sixth grade if we pick French and not Latin.
So my guess is learn a language with some kind of material that has writing, audio and IPA, so you hear the words and see also the IPA writing.

[carto@mastodon.online]

@futurebird For me, the easy bit was seeing what my own language looks like when transcribed to IPA. I mean, I know how to say stuff, and seeing how it's transcribed helped me connect what I say to the IPA transcription. This was the basics for me.

As to other languages and phonemes that don't exist in any of the languages I speak well enough... If I'm really interested, I find examples and listen the pronunciations by a native speaker and look at the transcription.

[itnomad@ruhr.social]

@futurebird
I am still learning, but my go-to reference is https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/IPAcharts/IPA_charts_EI/IPA_charts_EI.html

What I like is that they have sound samples!

[klara@drupal.community]

@futurebird but in another dialect, the IPA would be different. Makes the mind boggle.

[hgfernan@ursal.zone]

@futurebird That's an interesting point: maybe there's not a canonical way of saying the phonemes (or sounds) that the International Phonetic alphabet intends to represent.

It seems that Gboard, the Android keyboard utility can be used to pronounce IPA phonemes. And more specialized apps like Pronunroid can be more precise.

[morst@toad.social]

@futurebird when I was a toddler I learned it from a TV show that they broadcast. But I grew up in the Midwest speaking pretty standard sounding Flat Midwestern English, and found out later that they stopped the show because people all over the country didn’t all talk like us!
It didn’t work well for thick New England, new yawk, or southern accents for instance.

[abuseofnotation@mathstodon.xyz]

@dgold @futurebird It exists in all Slavic languages... Weird that it is pronounced differently in Czech...

[abuseofnotation@mathstodon.xyz]

@meganL @futurebird But he didn't make the word up, the word existed before.

[willyyam@mastodon.social]

@futurebird A phenomenon related to this, I think, is that orthography is more subjective than people assume.

Get people with different accents, birth languages spell onomatopoeia (an example, not the actual word, eg "woof"), and you'll see it really starkly.