Thank you for the excellent links. A lot of your comments really ring true. A number of times I've really wished that the international phonetic alphabet was fa

Thank you for the excellent links. A lot of your comments really ring true. A number of times I've really wished that the international phonetic alphabet was far more widespread and included in more language learning materials. In addition as someone who has spent countless hours studying vocab flashcards with very little gains I can corroborate the fact that using it as a primary study method is quite ineffective. When I want to flashcard style studying now I focus on sentences, or groups of sentences with translations. The added context helps significantly but is still no substitute for full passages of text.