chuenk
Do english people learn english by phonetic symbol? we must learn phonetic symbol,beacuse dont know how to read.and why english people know how to read someone's name as they see it at once.
Aug 22, 2011 7:53 AM
Answers · 7
3
No. There have been various experiments in using different alphabets to teach reading, but they haven't been very successful. I don't know what system is being used now. Most English people subconsciously recognise which language a word comes from and pronounce it correctly, but sometimes there are mistakes - and sometimes different people pronounce the same word differently.
August 22, 2011
1
Although most of European languages share the same alphabet more or less, each speaker becomes accustomed to recognising letters and sequences of letters used in their own language (eg. 'th' as recognised by a French speaker, an English speaker or a Gaelic speaker). That's how we can "guess" pronunciation. The IPA was created as an attempt at a "neutral" form of phonetic writing. Personally, I find its application very limited and often unreliable. It certainly wasn't taught to me as a child. For you as a Mandarin/Cantonese speaker, if you're learning only English at this moment, then I don't think the IPA will help any more than regular English texts.
August 22, 2011
1
We learn English from our parents, and then we learn to read from our teachers. As we are native speakers, we do not learn English in the same way that you do. Remember how you learnt Chinese? It's no different for English speakers.
August 22, 2011
1
As the others have said, native English speakers do not learn to recognize words with phonetics. The English alphabet and orthography is very unreliable and inconsistent, especially compared to Pinyin and even the Latin characters used for other languages like Spanish and Italian. However, our dictionaries do use phonetic transcription. If we're not sure how to pronounce a word (for example, "vexillographer", a word almost nobody uses) we'll look in the dictionary for the pronunciation ("ˌvɛksəˈlɒgrəfər"). A lot of dictionaries use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and the symbols consistently refer to the same sound (unlike English where "gh" can be silent, an /f/, and so on). It is a lot to learn, though, but you can go here: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/ Honestly it's probably not worth the effort. Learn how English sounds first, then learn how to recognize how words are pronounced.
August 22, 2011
thank you all. everyone's imformation is useful for me,but I just only choose mister Brett's for the best answer because of his first arriving.
August 23, 2011
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