Hi, Sol.

I've studied Spanish, French, Italian and English, but I needed the IPA (desperately) only for English.

I first heard about the IPA while trying to understand how to pronounce the English words correctly. I started learning English in school, at the age of 12, and since then I have read a lot of books on English, so my English was quite visual. Although I hadn't had much contact with the spoken English until 5 years now, I was good at pronunciation because I had learned the English-related IPA by myself (My first English teacher told us something about the IPA characters in English, but at that age I was too young to understand the idea behind those symbols).

My conclusions about the IPA:

1) when you learn a language that sounds pretty different from the ones you're familiar with or when you learn a language whose phonetic system has more exceptions than rules the IPA helps a lot

2) The IPA is not taught in schools in Romania, because in Romanian you write the way you read (99%)

3) A lot of English books have transcriptions of English, because there's a huge difference between what you say and what you write

4) there are people who are extremely good at speaking English and have no clue about what the IPA is, because they learned English the natural way, by listening a lot to it

5) if you're dealing with a language that has these similarities with English, you don't have to learn all the signs there, just the ones related to your target language

6) the IPA characters are not as scary as they seem to be

7) I didn't need the IPA to learn Spanish, French and Italian, because they have clear rules about pronunciation. I sometimes use it for words that have certain peculiarities in these languages.

Hope this helps you. Good luck!

We were taught the IPA (not the beer ;}) while/when learning English, and given the fact that English spelling is next to meaningless for its pronunciation I found it essential. I also still occasionally check pronunciation differences between standard US and UK English using the IPA.

Hannah: But how did you get to study the IPA,was it because of a teacher who introduce you into the system? or did you find it and studied by yourself? I ask because at some point it gets really technically, and so to speak "no user friendly" which ends up discouraging to those who try to study it by themselves.

človek : So you were introduced to the IPA as a child? That's really cool. That's not the case in my country, teachers have already a hard time trying to get the students into studying vocabulary as to teach pronunciation as well, at least, I discuberd the IPA by watching random videos on youtube. Which pronunciation comes easier to you? British or American?

I learned the IPA before starting Korean, however, found that since Korean was largely phonetic and had an alphabet it was unnecessary. It is a neat tool however at the beginning to visualize the differences between similar sounds in minimal pairs. I would be more inclined to use IPA for languages that have more pictographic symbols for writing to help acquire words when I am still unable to associate sounds with symbols. I’ve mainly heard that IPA is helpful for people who find themselves learning many languages and need a common system to interpret pronunciation.

Now, I am deleting the IPA from my Anki cards, but I mainly keep them for when I cannot find an audio file for a new word and I cannot intuitively understand the pronunciation rule.

@Sol: we did learn IPA & BE at school, it was pretty much introduced at day one (well, as best as the teachers could produce it and the "language laboratories" with the hearing and speaking samples could provide). Over the years, and given the auricular omnipresence of US English (music, movies, more American than British tourists) I've become quite familiar with both, and if the dialect isn't too crass can understand both quite well.

My "own" English is NZ English with a fairly slight German twang, most Kiwis mistake me for an "Afrikaander" who has lived in NZ for some time ...