The Challenge

As you might already know, part of my final English exam will be about pronunciation. I have started putting together a glossary with all the words we have to study and, of course, their pronunciation. As you can see, I am using the IPA symbols that I talked about in my last post.

Sometimes, I was quite surprised by how much the pronunciation differed from what I thought! English is really an unpredictable language when it comes to pronunciation. As if to prove this assumption, a few days later I found out about a poem called "The Chaos".

There are many archaic words in it, which of course I didn't know how to pronounce, but suddenly I also realized how unsure I am about some words I have seen before and thought I knew!  My plan for the next few days is to work my way through this poem, learn some new (or rather old?) words and be surprised by the unpredictability of English pronunciation.

Isn't it wonderful to study a language that is so irregular? New surprises are awaiting you every day! :-)

Dearest creature in creation, 

Study English pronunciation. 

I will teach you in my verse 

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. 

I will keep you, Suzy, busy, 

Make your head with heat grow dizzy. 

Tear in eye, your dress will tear. 

So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard, 

Dies and diet, lord and word, 

Sword and sward, retain and Britain. 

(Mind the latter, how it's written.) 

Now I surely will not plague you 

With such words as plaque and ague. 

But be careful how you speak: 

Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; 

Cloven, oven, how and low, 

Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery, 

Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, 

Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, 

Exiles, similes, and reviles; 

Scholar, vicar, and cigar, 

Solar, mica, war and far; 

One, anemone, Balmoral, 

Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; 

Gertrude, German, wind and mind, 

Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet, 

Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. 

Blood and flood are not like food, 

Nor is mould like should and would. 

Viscous, viscount, load and broad, 

Toward, to forward, to reward. 

And your pronunciation's OK 

When you correctly say croquet, 

Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, 

Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour 

And enamour rhyme with hammer. 

River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, 

Doll and roll and some and home. 

Stranger does not rhyme with anger, 

Neither does devour with clangour. 

Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, 

Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, 

Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, 

And then singer, ginger, linger, 

Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, 

Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very, 

Nor does fury sound like bury. 

Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. 

Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. 

Though the differences seem little, 

We say actual but victual. 

Refer does not rhyme with deafer. 

Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. 

Mint, pint, senate and sedate; 

Dull, bull, and George ate late. 

Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, 

Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven, 

Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. 

We say hallowed, but allowed, 

People, leopard, towed, but vowed. 

Mark the differences, moreover, 

Between mover, cover, clover; 

Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, 

Chalice, but police and lice; 

Camel, constable, unstable, 

Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal, 

Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. 

Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, 

Senator, spectator, mayor. 

Tour, but our and succour, four. 

Gas, alas, and Arkansas. 

Sea, idea, Korea, area, 

Psalm, Maria, but malaria. 

Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. 

Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian, 

Dandelion and battalion. 

Sally with ally, yea, ye, 

Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. 

Say aver, but ever, fever, 

Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. 

Heron, granary, canary. 

Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface. 

Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. 

Large, but target, gin, give, verging, 

Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. 

Ear, but earn and wear and tear 

Do not rhyme with here but ere. 

Seven is right, but so is even, 

Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, 

Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, 

Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche! 

Is a paling stout and spikey? 

Won't it make you lose your wits, 

Writing groats and saying grits? 

It's a dark abyss or tunnel: 

Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, 

Islington and Isle of Wight, 

Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough -- 

Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? 

Hiccough has the sound of cup. 

My advice is to give up!!! 

 

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?"