IPA

IPA? Isn't that what the Simpsons' grandpa is shouting in the movie when he becomes mad and has visions in the middle of a mass?

Not quite...although in a way "IIIIIPAAAAA" has become my mantra for improving my English pronunciation.

IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet. It is supposed to represent the sounds of spoken language in a way that is more accurate than the roughly 25 letters we use in the Latin alphabet. You might have seen those funny signs in online dictionaries, and you might have noticed that some look like normal letters or are very similar. That is because IPA is based on the Latin alphabet, but like I mentioned, it adds more "shades" to it.

I decided to learn the IPA some years ago, mainly because I was bored, I think, and only now have I realised how helpful it can be. For our final exam, we have to study a list with hundreds of words, and of course I did not know how to pronounce all of them. I can listen to their pronunciation in an online dictionary, but maybe I also want to study "offline", away from the Internet and its distractions (don't tell me you've never "just wanted to check this and that social network real quick" and then ended up staying on the page for an hour). For studying "offline" it is helpful to know the IPA because I can add the transcription to my glossary and print it. Another advantage is that IPA is relatively abstract and universal. It is supposed to represent the "ideal" pronunciation of the word and is free from a particular speaker's accent (though, of course, different transcriptions are sometimes necessary for BrE and AmE).

There are probably hundreds of different IPA symbols, but if you only use them to study English vocabulary and pronunciation, it is enough to recognise 44 of them. Here is an interactive chart giving you an overview of what these 44 sounds are.

I also found a website with example sentences to each of the 44 sounds and audio files of a British speaker reading these sentences. The sentences do not always make a lot of sense and sometimes resemble tongue twisters, but they are fun to repeat! Unfortunatley, I found the site on my phone and took a very bad screenshot that cut off the IPA symbols. Now I cannot find the website anymore, but here are the 44 sentences: 

On the other hand, why not make it a quiz in which you have to recognise the IPA symbol that goes with each sentence?

I recorded myself reading all 44 sentences and listened to it afterwards. I picked the sentences I was not yet happy with, wrote them on colourful sheets of paper, underlined the problem sounds and added some cute drawings. Then I put them on a magnetic board in my flat so that I will look at them and repeat them every day. I'm planning to record another audio file after a few weeks and compare it with the first one to see if and how I improved.

I know that forcing yourself to listen to your own voice recordings is a difficult step, but as Emma Watson says in this interview: "How do you expect to get better if you don't watch your performances?"