Phonetic Alphabet?

[gothwalk]

What's the best way to go about learning the phonetic alphabet? I've just realised, trying to explain in text to a Canadian colleague, that trying to render a Northern Irish accent in the mundane alphabet is wholly impossible. The greeting that you'd write as "How's you?" gets mangled into "Hyee's yi-e?", and still doesn't convey either the sound or the fact that it sounds pleasant.

Comments

[kehoea.livejournal.com]

This is a great resource for it, but it’s something that’s difficult to pick up without face-to-face instruction from someone who knows it well, at least if your own accent isn’t RP or unspecific-North-American.

One thing that may help you in this case is that a lot of the dialectal variation in English is a matter of changing diphthongs (double vowels); so I might say [noʊ] for “no” while an Australian might say [noy]; I can’t reproduce the exact thing you describe there in my mind's ear, so no actual transcription from me this time, I'm afraid :-( . (Even that would be of limited usefulness if your Canadian friend can't read it.)

[kehoea.livejournal.com]

Another thing is that Nina probably knows the basics already, since in civilised countries it's used as an important part of language teaching, and since good dictionaries published in Europe (including the UK) use it as the pronunciation guide, and I'm quite certain she hasn't been working on a "ask-Drew-every-awkward-thing" principle in learning English. Which is not to say she knows all the crazy stuff, like how to transcribe a glottal stop, or an ejective click.