spent some time in Asian countries learning Chinese and Thai (mostly trying to impress my local GF's at the time).
It took me ~6 months to understand where a word started and ended. When I tried saying the most simple things I got blank stares. But when when they repeated it back to me it sounded exactly like what I said all along.
Try to say "Dry wood burns doesn't it?" in Thai and you get different variations of the word "Mai" which sounds like "Mai mai mai maii?" ... or "spicy duck with pepper" that is just "phet ped pet ped PET ..." etc
I eventually ended up marrying a Japanese girl (so heating with wood was never an issue neither was ordering spicy duck with pepper). And their language is all rather monotone (as you probably know from your own time there).
using this IPA would have gotten me more ridicule than ordering spicy duck from a wooden grill. And if I would have trusted HN (and this chart) I'd still be feckless today thank you very much :P (I'll take an Indian Pale Ale though without all the moaning)
Is it? I mean, like I would never want to invest the time to actually learning how to decipher it. It doesn't seem worth the effort when there are audio ways to convey the information.
The difference is that the IPA tells you how to use your anatomy to create the right sound. Someone with the right knowledge can look at a word in IPA and know how to construct it to get an accurate reproduction.
You might be able to hear an unfamiliar word and try to reproduce it, but in a lot of cases you will only get, at best, a rough approximation unless you also know how to shape your tongue, where the sounds come from and what the accent is.
English is a very forgiving language, generally speaking, but highly tonal languages (like Vietnamese and Mandarin) won’t let you get away with simple mimicry, at least not without a lot of work to nail the pronunciation.
The IPA is invaluable for studying human language, not just _a_ language. I.e.: For linguists.
For individuals wishing to learn a foreign language, the IPA probably isn't super helpful. Your mind needs to learn to pick up on new sounds if you are going to be able to converse anyway and you should definitely learn your target language's orthography to be a proficient reader/writer.
That said, I enjoy learning languages in addition to studying (comparing, contrasting, etc) and have found the IPA helpful to give me a leg up on that. Therefore, I recommend the IPA for polyglots and linguists.
It took me ~6 months to understand where a word started and ended. When I tried saying the most simple things I got blank stares. But when when they repeated it back to me it sounded exactly like what I said all along.
Try to say "Dry wood burns doesn't it?" in Thai and you get different variations of the word "Mai" which sounds like "Mai mai mai maii?" ... or "spicy duck with pepper" that is just "phet ped pet ped PET ..." etc
I eventually ended up marrying a Japanese girl (so heating with wood was never an issue neither was ordering spicy duck with pepper). And their language is all rather monotone (as you probably know from your own time there).
using this IPA would have gotten me more ridicule than ordering spicy duck from a wooden grill. And if I would have trusted HN (and this chart) I'd still be feckless today thank you very much :P (I'll take an Indian Pale Ale though without all the moaning)