You know what annoys me? When in a dictionary, or on Wikipedia or wherever, after a word, there will be a 'pronounced such and such', in italics, in brackets. And it's apparently supposed to be really helpful in teaching you the words' correct pronunciation.
But it's in another language.
It doesn't even use proper letters. It's all these back to front, upside down ones, with strokes and dashes all over the place. Yeah thanks, I was having a little trouble getting the pronunciation right, but now that you've written out how it sounds using Ancient Hebrew characters with a twist of Elvish script, I'm all over it.
Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)
Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)
6 comments:
It's phoenetic - so it has more letters than English so that you can accurately find out what the sounds are.
You can click on the pronunciation in wikipedia to see how to read it. Most dictionaries will have the pronunciation guide in there as well.
Hmm, now where did I put that pesky too hard basket..
Does that mean that because I can read and write phonetically (thanks to studying Linguistics and Speech Pathology) I can now say I have a second language?
Sure, why not.
yeah -- as an ESL teacher i am familiar with it and many students do find it helpful -- just think of how irregular english spelling is: as a second language learner, you'd have no idea how to pronounce words if a teacher didn't tell you or you didn't have this alphabet to help. reading english only makes sense if you've grown up with it.
that being said -- i can't read the pronunciations to save my life. if you haven't learned them, they're useless.
And of course, there's always regional accents to consider if it were written in English. The phonetic script doesn't suffer from this as each character relates to a tongue/mouth combination as opposed to things like "oo" as in "school" which has a wide variety of pronunciation even here in Australia.
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