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Comment by xkjkls | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain the usefulness of IPA currently? I guess I wonder what benefit there is to learning IPA at this point in time. I feel like its major usefulness was when there existed no way to communicate audio information easily, which is no longer the case.

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If you need to communicate to someone how a given foreign word is pronounced, IPA is invaluable.

Audio doesn't do the same job, really, since it relies on a trained ear and the ability to distinguish what each individual sound is. Experts have this. The people that most need the help, don't.

What is a good way to communicate audio information. Listening to audio doesn't necessarily explain how the sound was made (well it does kind of), whereas seeing a word in IPA makes it easy to reproduce (for people familiar with IPA) and compare.

English writing is not a good phonetic system for representing speech even for the English language: IMO a 1-to-1 mapping between pronunciation and spelling should be the goal.

You might want to explain how to pronounce the word in a British or Australian accent or compare it to how a word was pronounced 200 years ago. In that case you can use a phonetic alphabet to show the difference.

The idea is to have a writing system which can be used to accurately record all possible sounds. It's helpful for learning languages with bad alphabets such as English (https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teaching-pronunci...), for describing accents and for comparing languages and linguistics work.

PS: I don't know IPA so I'm probably wrong about everything.

IPA was never meant to be a substitute for audio - it was meant to be tools for describing the content of the audio. And if you want to talk about human sounds, it's still as relevant as before. Just like nobody would say "That red dot you can see over there" when you could instead say "Mars", even if Mars is perfectly visible right now.

In addition to all the other (excellent!) sibling replies, I’d like to add that there are some cases in which audio is impractical. e.g. I often see reference grammars of obscure languages use IPA transcription, especially when there is no standard orthography and the language uses a lot of unusual sounds. In those cases, IPA is often the only feasible option.

Being able to represent speech in writing is still pretty useful, even in 2021!

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.

Actors use it extensively to learn accents

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