Re: OT: Foreign Language Books using IPA

On Sat, 31 Aug 2002 12:26:06 -0700, Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>
wrote:

>I was browsing through the language section at Barnes & Noble the other
>day. I took Spanish in high school and always wanted to try picking up
>French, but I didn't have room in my schedule for the extra language class
>and the pronunciation was very difficult to pick up soley from a textbook.
>
>Today I got to thinking, why don't foreign language textbooks use the IPA
>as a pronunciation guide? The usual system that I've seen, where the book
>will spell the words using English spelling rules, is unreliable because
>sometimes a native English speaker can't even pronounce a new English word
>correctly without consulting a friend or a dictionary.
There really is no substitute for a recording. But IPA would be far
preferable to misleading English "spelling pronunciations". The problem
with some of the newer books, though, is that they refer you to the
cassette for sounds that are hard to describe in English -- even though
they're available without cassettes! They should at least make _some_
attempt to describe the sounds.

>Okay, so I probably already know the answer why they don't have such
>textbooks -- students would complain of having to learn a new system of
>transcribing in addition to a new language. But after the first time, they
>could confidently pronounce new words in any other foreign language
>textbooks. ... Ah well. </rant>
>
>But my real question is this: Does anyone know of a textbook on learning a
>foreign language (any will do, really) that uses the IPA rather than
>pseudo-English?
Some of the older Teach Yourself books used variations of IPA; for
instance, _Norwegian_ by Ingvald Marm & Alf Sommerfelt uses IPA with dots
instead of hooks to mark the retroflex consonants, and special marks for
the Norwegian tones.

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