How to learn phonetic symbols and their corresponding sounds

On Friday, I talked in detail about how learning phonetics can help you with pronunciation. We also took a quick look at the phonetic (phonemic) chart of sounds used in English. Before we start looking in detail at each phonetic symbol and its corresponding sound, let’s look at the process I suggest for learning them.

1. Go to the EnglishClub website (or any other website where you can see and hear English language phonetic symbols). Please note that the words given as examples are using Standard Southern British English. For more information on this, please see Friday's blog.
2. Click on the first symbol. Listen to it and repeat it several times.
3. Look at the word written under the symbol. To hear how the word sounds, you can go to websites such as Google Translate or wordreference.com.
4. Learn one phonetic symbol/sound with its corresponding word at a time.

If you can, ask someone whose first language is English to repeat each sound and its corresponding word. If they can also show you what they do with their lips and describe what they’re doing inside their mouth, then even  better! 

If you like, you can also watch and listen to videos to see how the sounds are made. I would recommend this BBC course on YouTube: Improve Your Pronunciation with BBC Learning English - Introduction - YouTube which covers all the sounds of English. There is a list of all the course videos underneath the first video, on the right. In addition there are many other videos showing the phonetic symbols, their sounds and words containing them, such as Learn 44 Phonetic symbols (IPA) | British Accent - YouTube.

You can also get more of an idea of how to produce certain sounds by reading books on pronunciation/accent. One excellent resource I would recommend is Work on Your Accent, published by Collins.

Over the next few weeks, I will discuss/explain one symbol per working day. Throughout this time, I will be using the terms ‘phonetic’, ‘phoneme’ and ‘sound’. The phonetic is the actual symbol. The Phoneme is the sound it represents. Often, phoneme and sound are used interchangeably.

Tomorrow, we’ll start looking at phonetic symbols and their sounds, starting with the symbol i:

To continue reading this blog series, click on the right arrow below. To go back to the beginning, click on the left arrow below. If you're looking for a particular phonetic symbol or sound, click here to go to the index.