Afternoon everyone! First off I wanted to say thanks for the warm welcome.You guys have been great! I was reading a language reading book the other day, and it mentioned learning the IPA as well as the specific "sound table" for the language in order to be able to accurately depict the sounds in the language in question. Now I definitely see the application of learning something like this, but I just wanted to bring this to the group and get all of your opinions on it.
I thought I wrote about this before, but apparently not. Here is a quote from my post on pronunciation: Basically, I think of learning the linguistics of pronunciation, including IPA, as a long short cut. If you plan on learning a lot of languages, or even just one language with really tricky pronunciation, it's probably worth it. I should have learned it a long time ago, but it's hard for me to derail my one-track mind long enough to do stuff like this. I think this is sort of analogous to an inexperienced learner learning Esperanto for a first language. Studies show that learning it before other foreign languages will actually save the learner time, but only a very small percentage of likely candidates actually do it.
Good points. I just found a pretty handy deck for learning the symbols and positions on Memrise, so I think I'll work for that to get more used to the symbols. I also found specific IPA "sound tables" for most of the major languages, so you can use them to get familiar with the pronunciation before you delve into deeper study. A simple search for "IPA" or "language pronunciation" was all I needed. Hope this is useful!
