It may not be sufficient but it is surely very useful when you have no idea how to pronounce the word. Besides, I think it works quite well for English. When I

It may not be sufficient but it is surely very useful when you have no idea how to pronounce the word. Besides, I think it works quite well for English. When I started learning it I had to rely on the IPA transcriptions every time I looked up new words in a dictionary. Even now, when online dictionaries have nice recordings of the vocabulary spoken by native speakers, I still use it for proper nouns(names etc.) that are not included in dictionaries when I can't find the recorded pronunciation e.g. on Youtube.