4 ms·

I'm going to rant here... I hate the way some people seem to think that a recording is a good way of explaining the pronunciation of an English word. In my (big

by bloak 7y ago

I'm going to rant here... I hate the way some people seem to think that a recording is a good way of explaining the pronunciation of an English word. In my (bigoted) opinion the only good way to explain the pronunciation of an English word is with a phonemic transcription into IPA. This is because even within England there are are lots of different pronunciations of the same sound. What you want (or at least I want) to know is whether the first vowel in "Malcow", say, is the same as the vowel in "hawk" or the vowel in "trap". A recording of a particular person saying just the word "Malcow" doesn't necessarily give you that information, and certainly not in an accessible way. (Also, a lesser consideration: there are some native speakers of English who can distinguish certain sounds in their pronunciation but cannot, or cannot easily, hear the difference between those sounds. I would guess that either they learnt to speak partly by watching people's lips or their hearing has deteriorated as they got older.) None of the above is specific to English. If I wanted to know how a French word is pronounced I'd prefer IPA to a recording just the same, if not more so. Admittedly not everyone loves IPA like I do (perhaps some people think it's a kind of beer). The online Oxford English Dictionary provides IPA transcriptions of both the British and American pronunciations and you can click on them to hear a recording. Perfect.

azangru 7y ago
As Daniel Jones wrote in his The Pronunciation of English (I am paraphrasing from the 1962 edition, because I do not have it at hand), it is impossible to learn the sounds of English from phonemic transcriptions alone; you need a living teacher, or, in absense of them, good recordings of representative sounds (he went on to reference certain good-quality authoritative recordings of the time). Youtube can be regarded as one source of such recordings.
- bloak 7y ago
  Yes. There are two different things here: * Learning how to pronounce the sounds of English: for example, how to pronounce (standard) English /a/, which is, of course, different from (standard) German /a/. * Learning which sounds to use in a particular word: for example, is "swap" pronounced /swap/? (It isn't, of course. In practice most of the difficulties are caused by names of people and places.)
ramblerman 7y ago
Seem to think? hear and repeat is pretty much how we all acquired our mother tongues. IPA is nice in the absence of a tutor, or a native speaker, but it's definitely not superior. Forgetting the fact people need to be trained in understanding how to interpret IPA before they can even use it, it still misses some subtle inflections.
dghf 7y ago
> (Also, a lesser consideration: there are some native speakers of English who can distinguish certain sounds in their pronunciation but cannot, or cannot easily, hear the difference between those sounds. I would guess that either they learnt to speak partly by watching people's lips or their hearing has deteriorated as they got older.) It may also be down to the conceptual buckets into which we place sounds when learning languages, especially our native languages. For example, many English speakers would be surprised to learn that 'p' has two distinct pronunciations in English, aspirated (as in 'pin') and unaspirated (as in 'spin'). Similarly, the 'l' at the start of 'late' is not the same as that at the end of 'wool', the so-called 'dark l' sound. (Caveat: IIRC, some varieties of English do not make the latter distinction, and I wouldn't be surprised if some don't make the former one, either.) A couple of personal anecdotes: - I have a friend who pronounces the word "hook" with a long "oo" sound, whereas I pronounce it with a much shorter vowel (we have very different regional accents). When I pointed this out to him, he could not at first tell the difference between our pronunciations. It was only when I compared it to the difference between "pull" and "pool" -- which he did pronounce slightly differently -- that he grudgingly acknowledged the distinction. - A Northern Irish colleague expressed incredulity at the southern English habit of pronouncing "poor", "paw" and "pour" the same, when in his part of the world they were, to his ears, said quite differently. When he spoke those words, I could hear that difference too -- but only just, and it took concentration.
mkl 7y ago
I'm not sure I understand. A single word may have many different IPA transcriptions for different regional accents, so IPA won't necessarily tell you what you want to know.
Broken_Hippo 7y ago
A recording is a good, though, in the same way as hearing native people speak improves your own pronunciation over time. This even happens without you realizing it. If I really can't get a word down through pronunciation, it honestly helps to see it typed out phonetically in English. For example, "Hygiene" is spelled the same in both english and Norwegian, but pronunciation differs. So while in english we might say, "Hi-Gene", in Norwegian I say "Hee-gee-inne". It doesn't work for all words, especially with vowels and sounds that aren't in english. Had I only had IPA symbols, that takes even longer because of the time it takes to learn the symbolism. I think if it were truly a better way to learn, it would be taught to new immigrants instead of the immersive adult learning that I had, which focused vocabulary on repeating sounds and lots of listening, and the very occasional visual aide to know how to shape our mouth and where to put our tongues. Not that my pronunciation is perfect, mind you, but I'm passable even if I retain a strong English accent when I speak Norwegian. Most of the time, I'm understandable and the spouse is nice enough to point out rough spots if I slip up too much.

by bloak 7y ago

azangru 7y ago

As Daniel Jones wrote in his The Pronunciation of English (I am paraphrasing from the 1962 edition, because I do not have it at hand), it is impossible to learn the sounds of English from phonemic transcriptions alone; you need a living teacher, or, in absense of them, good recordings of representative sounds (he went on to reference certain good-quality authoritative recordings of the time). Youtube can be regarded as one source of such recordings.

bloak 7y ago
Yes. There are two different things here: * Learning how to pronounce the sounds of English: for example, how to pronounce (standard) English /a/, which is, of course, different from (standard) German /a/. * Learning which sounds to use in a particular word: for example, is "swap" pronounced /swap/? (It isn't, of course. In practice most of the difficulties are caused by names of people and places.)

ramblerman 7y ago

Seem to think? hear and repeat is pretty much how we all acquired our mother tongues. IPA is nice in the absence of a tutor, or a native speaker, but it's definitely not superior. Forgetting the fact people need to be trained in understanding how to interpret IPA before they can even use it, it still misses some subtle inflections.

dghf 7y ago

> (Also, a lesser consideration: there are some native speakers of English who can distinguish certain sounds in their pronunciation but cannot, or cannot easily, hear the difference between those sounds. I would guess that either they learnt to speak partly by watching people's lips or their hearing has deteriorated as they got older.) It may also be down to the conceptual buckets into which we place sounds when learning languages, especially our native languages. For example, many English speakers would be surprised to learn that 'p' has two distinct pronunciations in English, aspirated (as in 'pin') and unaspirated (as in 'spin'). Similarly, the 'l' at the start of 'late' is not the same as that at the end of 'wool', the so-called 'dark l' sound. (Caveat: IIRC, some varieties of English do not make the latter distinction, and I wouldn't be surprised if some don't make the former one, either.) A couple of personal anecdotes: - I have a friend who pronounces the word "hook" with a long "oo" sound, whereas I pronounce it with a much shorter vowel (we have very different regional accents). When I pointed this out to him, he could not at first tell the difference between our pronunciations. It was only when I compared it to the difference between "pull" and "pool" -- which he did pronounce slightly differently -- that he grudgingly acknowledged the distinction. - A Northern Irish colleague expressed incredulity at the southern English habit of pronouncing "poor", "paw" and "pour" the same, when in his part of the world they were, to his ears, said quite differently. When he spoke those words, I could hear that difference too -- but only just, and it took concentration.

mkl 7y ago

I'm not sure I understand. A single word may have many different IPA transcriptions for different regional accents, so IPA won't necessarily tell you what you want to know.

Broken_Hippo 7y ago

A recording is a good, though, in the same way as hearing native people speak improves your own pronunciation over time. This even happens without you realizing it. If I really can't get a word down through pronunciation, it honestly helps to see it typed out phonetically in English. For example, "Hygiene" is spelled the same in both english and Norwegian, but pronunciation differs. So while in english we might say, "Hi-Gene", in Norwegian I say "Hee-gee-inne". It doesn't work for all words, especially with vowels and sounds that aren't in english. Had I only had IPA symbols, that takes even longer because of the time it takes to learn the symbolism. I think if it were truly a better way to learn, it would be taught to new immigrants instead of the immersive adult learning that I had, which focused vocabulary on repeating sounds and lots of listening, and the very occasional visual aide to know how to shape our mouth and where to put our tongues. Not that my pronunciation is perfect, mind you, but I'm passable even if I retain a strong English accent when I speak Norwegian. Most of the time, I'm understandable and the spouse is nice enough to point out rough spots if I slip up too much.