How to Read IPA - Learn How Using IPA Can Improve Your Pronunciation

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

can also book English classes with our fully-qualified teachers, who can

help you with your English speaking, writing, IELTS preparation, or whatever else you need.

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.