Hi, I’m Gina. Welcome to Oxford Online English! In this lesson, you can learn about using IPA.
You’ll see how using IPA can improve your English pronunciation
and help you to avoid pronunciation mistakes.
To see more free English lessons, visit our website: Oxford Online English dot com. You
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So, this lesson is about IPA. What does IPA stand for?
IPA stands for ‘international phonetic alphabet’. Maybe you know something about IPA already.
For example… Why do you need IPA? Well,
you don’t *have* to learn it, but it can help you with English learning. Here’s why.
English spelling and pronunciation are horribly irregular. Take these words as examples:
thorough, Wednesday, consciousness, or champagne.
There’s not much relation between what you write and what you say. That makes things difficult.
To make it clear why this is, let’s do a different test.
We’re going to show you some colours. Say the colour of the square out loud as you see it.
Did you say ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘yellow’?
Did the words in a different colour slow you down?
Maybe that was easy, maybe not. Either way, your brain has to work harder,
because in this test, you have to read a word, and then ignore it and say something different.
That’s what reading English is like. You have to see one thing, and say something else.
Often, your instinct is to read the letters you see phonetically. This is tiring to fight against,
and it leads to pronunciation mistakes, which can easily become bad habits over time.
Using IPA when you study vocabulary solves this problem for you. With IPA,
you don’t have to see one thing and say another. IPA is one hundred per cent phonetic.
That means the pronunciation and the ‘spelling’ match exactly, every time.
If you’ve never used IPA before, it might look complicated.
It’s not. You can learn to use IPA from zero with one or two hours of practice.
In the rest of this lesson, you’ll get a basic introduction to reading and writing in IPA,
and you’ll see how you can use it to make your English learning easier and more effective.
One note before we continue: we’re using IPA based on southern British English pronunciation.
Other varieties of English, like US English, are written slightly differently in IPA.
However, the differences are not large.
So now, let’s look at how to read IPA.
First, some good news! Many IPA symbols are easy,
because they look like regular letters, and have the same pronunciation.
This is true for many consonant sounds, like /b/, /m/ or /l/.
Let’s try it. Even if you’ve never used IPA before,
I think you could guess what these words are.
Can you say the words? They are: street, traffic, darkness.
Remember that in IPA, the same sound is always written the same way. In English, a /k/ sound
can be written with the letters ‘k’ ‘c’, or maybe ‘q’, but in IPA, you always write it with ‘k’.
Consonant sounds which are often written with two letters in English,
like /ð/, /ʃ/ or /dʒ/, have symbols in IPA which look different from regular letters.
However, there aren’t so many of them. Take a look.
Pause the video if you want more time to study these.
Ready? Let’s do some practice. Can you read these words in IPA?
Can you read the words? They are: fridge, think, teacher, shopping.
By the way, do you see the little mark which looks like an apostrophe in the
last two words? Do you know what it means? This mark shows you where the stress is
in the word. The syllable after this little mark is stressed.
Now, you can already read a lot in IPA. What do you need next?
Reading vowels in IPA is a little more work. Why? Because the Roman alphabet
has six vowel letters, but there are at least 22 phonetic vowels in English pronunciation.
Why ‘at least?’ It’s because there isn’t one way to pronounce English, and so
there’s more than one way to write English in IPA.
Also, sometimes people use different systems for writing in IPA. For example,
one book might use the same symbol for two vowel sounds which are very similar to each other,
but another book might use different symbols.
Don’t worry about this. It’s not a problem. In this video, you’re seeing a common system
for writing English in IPA. You might see different patterns or symbols in other places.
It doesn’t mean that one way is right or wrong.
Anyway, let’s see how to read vowels in IPA.
You might know already that there are three kinds of vowel sounds in English:
short sounds, long sounds and diphthongs.
For example, the /ɪ/ sound in ‘bit’ is short. The /ɔː/ sound in ‘door’ is long.
The /əʊ/ sound in ‘home’ is a diphthong.
It’s easy to see the difference between these three types of sounds in IPA.
Short sounds appear as a single symbol.
Remember to pause whenever you need if you want to look at something in more detail.
Long sounds have a mark after them, which looks like a colon.
Diphthongs appear as two symbols. Going through the pronunciations of
all the vowel sounds would take a long time, plus we already made a whole video about it!
If you’re watching on YouTube, you can find a link in the video description.
You can also check the full version of this lesson on our website.
There are notes on IPA symbols and how to pronounce them.
Reading vowel sounds in IPA is more difficult, because there are more
possible spellings for each sound, so the connection between the IPA and the spelling
might be less obvious. But, with a little practice, you’ll be able to do it easily.
Let’s try a few words now.
Pause the video if you want more time to think about it.
Ready? The words are: woman, banana, brown, floor, information.
Let’s try five more. These are a little more challenging.
Can you work out what these words are? Again, pause the video if you need to.
The words are: airport, mango, anyone, early, zero.
Did you get them right?
If so, great! If not, don’t worry. You just need more time to get familiar with IPA.
How can you practise? Easy! There’s a great website:
tophonetics dot com. You can paste text into the site,
and it will change the text to IPA. You can even choose between UK and US pronunciation.
Take a text, paste it in to the website, and try reading the IPA. Spend a little time on
this kind of practice – five or ten minutes a day – and you’ll soon find it easy to read IPA.
What if you want to write in IPA on a computer or phone?
There are several options, but a good free one is ipa dot typeit dot org.
Now, you should have all the resources you need to practise reading and writing using IPA.
But, how should you use them? Let’s look.
In this section, we’ll give you some advice on using IPA
to help you learn English more efficiently and speak better.
Our first piece of advice might sound strange: consider *not* using IPA! Why?
Some people don’t benefit from it.
In our experience, using IPA is *really* helpful for some learners, but not for everyone.
For example, some learners get better results by listening and copying the pronunciation.
Some people are good at this, but there are others who can’t do it well.
This isn’t a problem. Different people learn in different ways. If you find IPA confusing
and you don’t feel that it’s helping you, don’t feel that you have to use it. It’s just a tool.
You can use it if it’s helpful, but there are other ways to learn, too.
If you think IPA will be helpful for you, then what?
First, whatever dictionary you use, find where the IPA transcriptions are given.
Some dictionaries hide the phonetic transcription behind a button, or at the bottom of the page.
Our two recommended online dictionaries are Lexico and Longman. Lexico puts the phonetic
transcription at the bottom. Longman has it next to the word, at the top of the page.
Second, get in the habit of writing down the IPA next to the word when you write down new
vocabulary. Don’t forget to mark the stress! Word stress is essential for clear pronunciation.
When you’re reviewing vocabulary, you should read the words out loud to practise the pronunciation.
When you do this, look *only* at the IPA. Don’t think about the spelling of the written word.
Look at the IPA and say the word out loud.
This way, you can be sure that you’re pronouncing words correctly
from the first time you study them. That lets you avoid training bad habits and making mistakes.
Learning IPA for the first time can take a couple of hours, but it’s worth the time.
Get into these habits, and your pronunciation will be clearer
and more accurate, and it doesn’t need much effort from you.
Do you have any other tips for using IPA to improve your English pronunciation?
Please let us know in the comments!
Thanks for watching!
See you next time!