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A Course in Phonetics
Offering the most current coverage available, A COURSE IN PHONETICS, 7e remains the authoritative text for the study of phonetics. Combining Peter Ladefoged's student-friendly writing style with Keith Johnson's comprehensive presentation, the Seventh Edition introduces concepts of speech production, describes speech in acoustic terms, and teaches practical phonetic skills including IPA transcription. Expanded sections on acoustic phonetics and speech motor control bring instructors up to date and help students use tools for digital inspection and manipulation of speech. Numerous updates include MRI images of vocal tracts. In addition, the thoroughly revised companion website includes interactive exercises, instant spectrograms for every chapter, over 4,000 audio files of nearly 100 languages, and maps keyed to sounds of languages where they are spoken. With its broad overview and numerous examples, A COURSE IN PHONETICS remains the ideal introduction to phonetics-no previous knowledge required!
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
December 10, 2011
Ladefoged's "A Course in Phonetics" is one of the most well-known and best phonetics books around. It is an excellent volume covering just about every element one must know to have a solid base in phonetics. The breakdown favors native English speakers, (and American ones in the US edition, at least) first providing a clear description of the phonetics of English including prosodic features, consonants, and vowels before moving on to all other sound systems. It is fantastically complete given the size.
One of the strengths of the volume lies in the insightful walkthroughs on producing some of the more difficult sounds, using such hints as how to determine which method of articulation one uses to produce the American English "R." To determine whether one bunch the tongue or curl the tip up, carefully insert a toothpick between one's teeth and judging by the point of contact on the surface or bottom of the tongue, it is easy to figure out. Other techniques, such as sucking in air to feel exposed areas for laterals, all provide extremely helpful ways of both identifying and articulating nearly all sounds. Furthermore, each chapter end includes a bevvy of performance exercises one can use to practice and alternate between sounds, getting down the rhythm of expression.
One of the only real weaknesses to the volume is in the CD portion. While immensely helpful, the CD was not updated between the 5th and 6th edition (even though it has "6th" printed on it). The exercises on the CD therefore do not match those in the book, yet it is really only a different order so still usable. On that point, I really noticed no differences between the 5th and 6th edition other than the exercises, which pisses me off to the classic tune of the publisher's release of a new edition for no legitimate reason. Especially given this book is expensive as sin (I paid around $120 for a new edition).
Those bureaucratic complaints aside, this book is the best there is currently for phonetics from of the most important people to have worked in the field. The illustrations and charts are extremely helpful for driving home points, the aforementioned descriptions are useful, and the glossary in the end is excellent. If you want to study some phonetics, get this.
One of the strengths of the volume lies in the insightful walkthroughs on producing some of the more difficult sounds, using such hints as how to determine which method of articulation one uses to produce the American English "R." To determine whether one bunch the tongue or curl the tip up, carefully insert a toothpick between one's teeth and judging by the point of contact on the surface or bottom of the tongue, it is easy to figure out. Other techniques, such as sucking in air to feel exposed areas for laterals, all provide extremely helpful ways of both identifying and articulating nearly all sounds. Furthermore, each chapter end includes a bevvy of performance exercises one can use to practice and alternate between sounds, getting down the rhythm of expression.
One of the only real weaknesses to the volume is in the CD portion. While immensely helpful, the CD was not updated between the 5th and 6th edition (even though it has "6th" printed on it). The exercises on the CD therefore do not match those in the book, yet it is really only a different order so still usable. On that point, I really noticed no differences between the 5th and 6th edition other than the exercises, which pisses me off to the classic tune of the publisher's release of a new edition for no legitimate reason. Especially given this book is expensive as sin (I paid around $120 for a new edition).
Those bureaucratic complaints aside, this book is the best there is currently for phonetics from of the most important people to have worked in the field. The illustrations and charts are extremely helpful for driving home points, the aforementioned descriptions are useful, and the glossary in the end is excellent. If you want to study some phonetics, get this.
November 28, 2025
There are always some books you read because a syllabus tells you to, and then there are the books that just walk into your life uninvited and change the entire architecture of your thinking. ‘A Course in Phonetics’ is absolutely the latter — the academic equivalent of that friend who drags you to a concert you didn’t plan to attend and suddenly you’re like, “Oh… sound is a whole universe?”
In 2003, when this book landed in my world, it didn’t just introduce phonetics; it rearranged how I ‘heard’ the world. And that is the peculiar power of Peter Ladefoged — the man doesn’t just teach speech sounds, he teaches perception itself.
Reading Ladefoged is like stepping into a masterclass taught by someone who’s part scientist, part field researcher, part storyteller, and part mischievous linguist who enjoys making students contort their tongues in ways they didn’t know were biomechanically possible.
What makes this book so mythological is that it takes something as seemingly dry as articulatory phonetics and turns it into this vivid, tactile, almost physical experience. You don’t just learn ‘about’ aspiration — you feel it as a personal relationship with your alveolar ridge.
The genius of this book begins with its refusal to treat phonetics as a static catalogue of sound labels. Ladefoged treats language like a living organism with moods, quirks, and regional temperaments. He never talks down to the reader; he simply opens the door and says, “Come, let’s listen to how the planet really speaks.” And suddenly the entire world becomes a phonetic landscape.
Every bus conductor, every vowel on the radio, every whispered conversation in a café becomes data, becomes wonder, becomes a little acoustic mystery.
Compared to other phonetics textbooks — say, Daniel Jones’s older works, which feel like reading inscriptions on marble tablets, or Catford’s ‘Fundamental Problems’, which is brilliant but delivered with the pedagogical warmth of a refrigerator — Ladefoged is practically cinematic. He doesn’t just give you diagrams of a velar stop; he creates an environment in which the ‘idea’ of a velar stop makes sense to your body before your mind catches up.
Even the notorious IPA chart, which terrorizes first-year linguistics students like a spooky ghost of symbols, becomes strangely approachable under his guidance. You start seeing the symmetry: front, central, back; high, mid, low; voiced, voiceless, aspirated, nasalized; a neat grid that suddenly feels like music rather than cryptography.
Part of his magic comes from how deeply empiricist he is. He isn’t guessing what sounds do — he has literally travelled the world with recording equipment, sitting in forests, villages, and urban landscapes to document human speech in its wild, unfiltered form. You’re not learning phonetics from a theorist; you’re learning it from someone who has listened to languages most linguists only see as footnotes. And that field experience pulses through the text like a heartbeat.
This becomes especially clear when he teaches the acoustic side of phonetics. Where another author might bombard you with spectrograms that look like seismographic reports from an earthquake, Ladefoged gently eases you in, showing you how formants curve and dance, why vowels leave acoustic fingerprints, how periodicity structures sound. It starts to feel less like physics and more like pattern-spotting, like seeing the secret geometry of human speech. Chapters that could have been nightmares turn into conversations.
But perhaps the most radical part of ‘A Course in Phonetics’ is the way it treats the human body. Ladefoged brings an intimacy to articulatory explanation that feels almost uncanny at first. Suddenly, you become acutely aware of where your tongue is at any given moment. You start noticing tiny muscle adjustments when you speak. You realise speakers of other languages move parts of their mouth in ways you never considered.
You start hearing aspiration in English. You become painfully aware that your alveolar ridge exists. And before you know it, you’re out there low-key analysing everyone’s vowels like you’ve turned into a phonetics detective.
This is why the book alters worldviews: it changes the reader’s ‘relationship’ to sound. Before reading it, sound is background; after reading it, sound is foreground, subject, object, data, and delight.
In comparison with more modern phonetics texts — like Johnson’s ‘Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics’ or Reetz & Jongman’s ‘Phonetics: Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception’ — Ladefoged still feels like the most accessible entry point. Johnson is fantastic but leans heavily into digital acoustics; Reetz & Jongman are detailed but a little dehydrated.
Ladefoged, however, blends the human and the scientific. He makes the larynx feel like a protagonist. He makes voicing feel like drama. He makes coarticulation feel like choreography.
If you put this book beside Chomsky & Halle’s ‘The Sound Pattern of English’, it becomes even more hilarious — those two treat phonology like pure mathematics, while Ladefoged treats phonetics like embodied science. Chomsky and Halle live in the mind; Ladefoged lives in the mouth.
And that’s why students often find ‘A Course in Phonetics’ a relief after trudging through theoretical phonology — it reminds them that before you classify sound, you must ‘hear’ it, and before you analyse speech, you must understand the apparatus producing it.
One of the unexpected beauties of the book is the emotional undercurrent of curiosity. Lagerfoged is constantly urging readers to go beyond the printed page, to listen to people around them, to record, to experiment, to imitate unfamiliar sounds. That invitation to play is powerful.
It transforms the learner from a passive note-taker into an active observer of the phonetic universe. And in a world where academic texts often crush enthusiasm under jargon, this book stands out as a rebel.
It’s also worth appreciating how much historical context is embedded in the book’s DNA. Ladefoged learned and later critiqued earlier phoneticians; he was trained partly in the shadow of the London School, and you can see him pushing boundaries they took as stable. His insistence on variability — on the fact that sounds are not abstract categories but messy, shifting, gradient phenomena — becomes a quiet rebellion against rigid structuralism.
In that sense, ‘A Course in Phonetics’ feels closer to modern lab phonology than to older articulatory tradition.
This is also where the book becomes deeply comparative. Ladefoged never isolates English as the default. Instead, he uses languages from all over the world to illustrate phonetic principles: Yoruba tones, Navaho consonants, Scottish English vowels, Zulu clicks, French nasalization, Thai diphthongs. You don’t realize it at first, but you’re absorbing a subtle message: no language is the norm; every language is one more fascinating adaptation of the same vocal machinery. That worldview alone is enough to shatter linguistic prejudice.
For students of pedagogy, this book becomes an absolute goldmine because Ladefoged doesn’t just describe phenomena — he demonstrates how to teach them. His explanations are models of clarity. He uses the simplest possible words for the most complicated systems.
His pedagogical sequencing is meticulous: he begins with what you can feel, then what you can hear, then what you can measure. This scaffolding is why so many teachers, including you, respond to him so strongly — his method aligns instinctively with how learning ‘should’ happen.
Another layer that becomes apparent as you reread the book is how interdisciplinary phonetics actually is. There’s anatomy here, physiology, acoustics, psychology, anthropology, field methods, and an entire philosophy of scientific listening.
It’s no wonder the book felt revolutionary in 2003 — it pulls you into a world where sound is a portal into how humans are built, biologically and culturally. Once you’ve taken that journey, it’s impossible to go back to hearing speech as random noise.
Even the exercises — which in other textbooks feel like chores — become small adventures. You imitate sounds you didn’t know existed. You practice transcription until the IPA stops looking like alien graffiti.
You compare minimal pairs until you start hearing micro-differences you’d never noticed. Ladefoged sneaks in skill-building without ever making it feel like pressure. That is mastery.
Phonologists reading this book often end up in a crisis: you can’t cling to neat abstract categories after Ladefoged makes you hear the chaotic beauty of real speech.
If Chomsky imagines an ideal speaker-listener in a homogeneous community (which is basically a unicorn wearing headphones), Ladefoged imagines the entire planet, speaking in all its messy diversity. The contrast is almost comedic, and yet both views matter. But Ladefoged’s view is the one that feels humane.
What makes the book even more meaningful is how gracefully it ages. Even though technology has evolved, with Praat software, ultrasound tongue imaging, and computational modelling refining the field, the conceptual clarity and explanatory framework of ‘A Course in Phonetics’ remain unbeatable.
It reads like a book that understands it is foundational — not in a boastful way, but in the gentle confidence of someone who knows the anatomy of truth.
By the time you reach the later chapters, a kind of transformation has already happened to you. You start hearing the world in spectrograms. You start thinking of human interaction in terms of articulatory settings. You notice that someone’s Bengali retroflex is softer than someone else’s. You notice schwas disappearing in rapid speech. You become attuned.
It doesn’t exaggerate to say that the book rewires your auditory system.
And that change sticks. Even years later, when you’re teaching, when you’re analysing poetry, when you’re listening to students read, the Ladefoged-lens is there — quietly sharpening your ear, reminding you that every voice is a biomechanical and cultural miracle.
In the end, the reason ‘A Course in Phonetics’ becomes life-changing is simple: it makes the invisible visible.
It reveals the hidden architecture of speech, the muscle memory behind meaning, the science behind the seemingly effortless act of talking. And there is something profoundly humbling about that.
When you close the book after a deep read, you don’t just know more — you hear more.
You understand more. You become more.
Most recommended for all beginners of Linguistics and Phonology.
In 2003, when this book landed in my world, it didn’t just introduce phonetics; it rearranged how I ‘heard’ the world. And that is the peculiar power of Peter Ladefoged — the man doesn’t just teach speech sounds, he teaches perception itself.
Reading Ladefoged is like stepping into a masterclass taught by someone who’s part scientist, part field researcher, part storyteller, and part mischievous linguist who enjoys making students contort their tongues in ways they didn’t know were biomechanically possible.
What makes this book so mythological is that it takes something as seemingly dry as articulatory phonetics and turns it into this vivid, tactile, almost physical experience. You don’t just learn ‘about’ aspiration — you feel it as a personal relationship with your alveolar ridge.
The genius of this book begins with its refusal to treat phonetics as a static catalogue of sound labels. Ladefoged treats language like a living organism with moods, quirks, and regional temperaments. He never talks down to the reader; he simply opens the door and says, “Come, let’s listen to how the planet really speaks.” And suddenly the entire world becomes a phonetic landscape.
Every bus conductor, every vowel on the radio, every whispered conversation in a café becomes data, becomes wonder, becomes a little acoustic mystery.
Compared to other phonetics textbooks — say, Daniel Jones’s older works, which feel like reading inscriptions on marble tablets, or Catford’s ‘Fundamental Problems’, which is brilliant but delivered with the pedagogical warmth of a refrigerator — Ladefoged is practically cinematic. He doesn’t just give you diagrams of a velar stop; he creates an environment in which the ‘idea’ of a velar stop makes sense to your body before your mind catches up.
Even the notorious IPA chart, which terrorizes first-year linguistics students like a spooky ghost of symbols, becomes strangely approachable under his guidance. You start seeing the symmetry: front, central, back; high, mid, low; voiced, voiceless, aspirated, nasalized; a neat grid that suddenly feels like music rather than cryptography.
Part of his magic comes from how deeply empiricist he is. He isn’t guessing what sounds do — he has literally travelled the world with recording equipment, sitting in forests, villages, and urban landscapes to document human speech in its wild, unfiltered form. You’re not learning phonetics from a theorist; you’re learning it from someone who has listened to languages most linguists only see as footnotes. And that field experience pulses through the text like a heartbeat.
This becomes especially clear when he teaches the acoustic side of phonetics. Where another author might bombard you with spectrograms that look like seismographic reports from an earthquake, Ladefoged gently eases you in, showing you how formants curve and dance, why vowels leave acoustic fingerprints, how periodicity structures sound. It starts to feel less like physics and more like pattern-spotting, like seeing the secret geometry of human speech. Chapters that could have been nightmares turn into conversations.
But perhaps the most radical part of ‘A Course in Phonetics’ is the way it treats the human body. Ladefoged brings an intimacy to articulatory explanation that feels almost uncanny at first. Suddenly, you become acutely aware of where your tongue is at any given moment. You start noticing tiny muscle adjustments when you speak. You realise speakers of other languages move parts of their mouth in ways you never considered.
You start hearing aspiration in English. You become painfully aware that your alveolar ridge exists. And before you know it, you’re out there low-key analysing everyone’s vowels like you’ve turned into a phonetics detective.
This is why the book alters worldviews: it changes the reader’s ‘relationship’ to sound. Before reading it, sound is background; after reading it, sound is foreground, subject, object, data, and delight.
In comparison with more modern phonetics texts — like Johnson’s ‘Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics’ or Reetz & Jongman’s ‘Phonetics: Transcription, Production, Acoustics, and Perception’ — Ladefoged still feels like the most accessible entry point. Johnson is fantastic but leans heavily into digital acoustics; Reetz & Jongman are detailed but a little dehydrated.
Ladefoged, however, blends the human and the scientific. He makes the larynx feel like a protagonist. He makes voicing feel like drama. He makes coarticulation feel like choreography.
If you put this book beside Chomsky & Halle’s ‘The Sound Pattern of English’, it becomes even more hilarious — those two treat phonology like pure mathematics, while Ladefoged treats phonetics like embodied science. Chomsky and Halle live in the mind; Ladefoged lives in the mouth.
And that’s why students often find ‘A Course in Phonetics’ a relief after trudging through theoretical phonology — it reminds them that before you classify sound, you must ‘hear’ it, and before you analyse speech, you must understand the apparatus producing it.
One of the unexpected beauties of the book is the emotional undercurrent of curiosity. Lagerfoged is constantly urging readers to go beyond the printed page, to listen to people around them, to record, to experiment, to imitate unfamiliar sounds. That invitation to play is powerful.
It transforms the learner from a passive note-taker into an active observer of the phonetic universe. And in a world where academic texts often crush enthusiasm under jargon, this book stands out as a rebel.
It’s also worth appreciating how much historical context is embedded in the book’s DNA. Ladefoged learned and later critiqued earlier phoneticians; he was trained partly in the shadow of the London School, and you can see him pushing boundaries they took as stable. His insistence on variability — on the fact that sounds are not abstract categories but messy, shifting, gradient phenomena — becomes a quiet rebellion against rigid structuralism.
In that sense, ‘A Course in Phonetics’ feels closer to modern lab phonology than to older articulatory tradition.
This is also where the book becomes deeply comparative. Ladefoged never isolates English as the default. Instead, he uses languages from all over the world to illustrate phonetic principles: Yoruba tones, Navaho consonants, Scottish English vowels, Zulu clicks, French nasalization, Thai diphthongs. You don’t realize it at first, but you’re absorbing a subtle message: no language is the norm; every language is one more fascinating adaptation of the same vocal machinery. That worldview alone is enough to shatter linguistic prejudice.
For students of pedagogy, this book becomes an absolute goldmine because Ladefoged doesn’t just describe phenomena — he demonstrates how to teach them. His explanations are models of clarity. He uses the simplest possible words for the most complicated systems.
His pedagogical sequencing is meticulous: he begins with what you can feel, then what you can hear, then what you can measure. This scaffolding is why so many teachers, including you, respond to him so strongly — his method aligns instinctively with how learning ‘should’ happen.
Another layer that becomes apparent as you reread the book is how interdisciplinary phonetics actually is. There’s anatomy here, physiology, acoustics, psychology, anthropology, field methods, and an entire philosophy of scientific listening.
It’s no wonder the book felt revolutionary in 2003 — it pulls you into a world where sound is a portal into how humans are built, biologically and culturally. Once you’ve taken that journey, it’s impossible to go back to hearing speech as random noise.
Even the exercises — which in other textbooks feel like chores — become small adventures. You imitate sounds you didn’t know existed. You practice transcription until the IPA stops looking like alien graffiti.
You compare minimal pairs until you start hearing micro-differences you’d never noticed. Ladefoged sneaks in skill-building without ever making it feel like pressure. That is mastery.
Phonologists reading this book often end up in a crisis: you can’t cling to neat abstract categories after Ladefoged makes you hear the chaotic beauty of real speech.
If Chomsky imagines an ideal speaker-listener in a homogeneous community (which is basically a unicorn wearing headphones), Ladefoged imagines the entire planet, speaking in all its messy diversity. The contrast is almost comedic, and yet both views matter. But Ladefoged’s view is the one that feels humane.
What makes the book even more meaningful is how gracefully it ages. Even though technology has evolved, with Praat software, ultrasound tongue imaging, and computational modelling refining the field, the conceptual clarity and explanatory framework of ‘A Course in Phonetics’ remain unbeatable.
It reads like a book that understands it is foundational — not in a boastful way, but in the gentle confidence of someone who knows the anatomy of truth.
By the time you reach the later chapters, a kind of transformation has already happened to you. You start hearing the world in spectrograms. You start thinking of human interaction in terms of articulatory settings. You notice that someone’s Bengali retroflex is softer than someone else’s. You notice schwas disappearing in rapid speech. You become attuned.
It doesn’t exaggerate to say that the book rewires your auditory system.
And that change sticks. Even years later, when you’re teaching, when you’re analysing poetry, when you’re listening to students read, the Ladefoged-lens is there — quietly sharpening your ear, reminding you that every voice is a biomechanical and cultural miracle.
In the end, the reason ‘A Course in Phonetics’ becomes life-changing is simple: it makes the invisible visible.
It reveals the hidden architecture of speech, the muscle memory behind meaning, the science behind the seemingly effortless act of talking. And there is something profoundly humbling about that.
When you close the book after a deep read, you don’t just know more — you hear more.
You understand more. You become more.
Most recommended for all beginners of Linguistics and Phonology.
September 8, 2009
Generally the structure of this book is as same as those desighned 2 teach a special course proprely. Phonetics is concered with describing the speech sounds which occur in all lgs spoken in the world. It begins by explaining how speech sounds r made, in 1st chapter, & finally considers utterances in a lg that can be taken in2 account both speaker`s point of view & listener`s, in last 1.
1ce more I decided 2 start studying Phonetics thorough Ladefoged view & surely it is the best spot 2...
1ce more I decided 2 start studying Phonetics thorough Ladefoged view & surely it is the best spot 2...
November 8, 2017
Probably in my personal TOP 5 introductions of university readings.
Written in an approachable way it excellent for complete beginners who are dealing with Phonetics for the first time.
On the edition, I can only say that its format is passable to an everyday bag (approximately 10'' laptop) and light to carry around with you.
It is definitely worth every penny and I am grateful the library has several copies of them to enjoy for a month.
Written in an approachable way it excellent for complete beginners who are dealing with Phonetics for the first time.
On the edition, I can only say that its format is passable to an everyday bag (approximately 10'' laptop) and light to carry around with you.
It is definitely worth every penny and I am grateful the library has several copies of them to enjoy for a month.
April 6, 2020
Every word in this book is so important! I love reading this book when I first get into the field of linguistics. It gives me lots of inspiration (about deciding to study linguistics) and helps me use a precise way to describe the sound I hear. If you also love the speech sounds in the world, you must read this masterpiece.
April 26, 2020
Superb little textbook! There's a ton of information jam packed in here, but more importantly, the authors provide so many amazing exercises that are aimed towards getting you used to producing speech sounds that are not native to English.
It's also very easy to read & digest. Overall, super happy with it!
It's also very easy to read & digest. Overall, super happy with it!
September 20, 2011
This book is a ideal course book for those who have a degree in Linguistics. Ladefoged is a expert in description of sound especially in fieldwork of linguistics. This book, which is republished for five times gives the readers the basic the pattern of the world's languages.
May 22, 2020
A good introduction to phonetics for beginners.
November 19, 2025
For our class, we read everything but the last chapter, but I'm counting it as a full read because this book took me many many hours to get through. It is dense and chock full of information, but I know that despite it being out of print, it is probably the best book out there for a beginning Phonetics class. The website you have free access to also has tons of recordings and useful exercises to accompany the text.
May 1, 2020
Tahle knížka mi pomohla k tomu, abych mohla předstírat, že vím něco o fonetice (když nepočítám ty naprosté základy z japonštiny).
June 19, 2020
Easily digestable. Good illustrations.
December 23, 2024
Moje trauma
Read
December 15, 2025dnf´d on page 71
February 15, 2021
This is literaly a course in phonetics. It's pretty academic. It's pretty much exactly the book I wanted to read on the subject, even if I only really want to be able to read IPA and am not terribly fussed by vowel position. Wish I'd read it sooner. It kind of does one thing - it's a course in phonetics - but it does it clearly and carefully. I've not got anything to compare it to but if you wanted to read about phonetics, this'd probably be the book to read innit.
Want to read
January 12, 2010Must read!
Master linguistics with A COURSE IN PHONETICS with accompanying CD-ROM! The hallmark text for the study of linguistics, A COURSE IN PHONETICS provides a broad overview of the branches of phonetics for students with no prior knowledge. Practicing what you have learned is easy with the CD-ROM that contains more than 4,000 audio files, including recordings of speech from southern and northern U.S. cities, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, New Zealand, other forms of English, and scores of other languages.
Master linguistics with A COURSE IN PHONETICS with accompanying CD-ROM! The hallmark text for the study of linguistics, A COURSE IN PHONETICS provides a broad overview of the branches of phonetics for students with no prior knowledge. Practicing what you have learned is easy with the CD-ROM that contains more than 4,000 audio files, including recordings of speech from southern and northern U.S. cities, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, New Zealand, other forms of English, and scores of other languages.
June 7, 2014
'A course in phonetics' is a seminally comprehensive book, in which Ladefoged masterfully, if not diligently, presents the core concepts of temporary phonological theory in a digestible and easy-to-handle approach. The book is theoretically balanced in its structure; however, its comprehensiveness may make it a bit difficult for those who do not possess prior familiarity with some of the basic concepts in the field of phonetics.
Read
June 6, 2011Just as its summary describes it, the book takes an easy-to-understand approach that begins with the basics. This is part of my crash course before graduate school. Will need to revisit a couple of chapters, maybe that on manners of articulation, specifically sounds that are not in English, and that on spectograms.
August 14, 2010
very comprehensible textbook, and the companion CD actually added value to the class. plus, prof. jeff says it's "the" authority on phonetics, so it was worth the $3 million it cost to buy the new edition!
January 19, 2015
It was an interesting read. I actually read it to supplement a course on linguistics on the Internet. It was insightful and useful for people learning to speak English as a second/foreign language.
Will pick it up again to finish it when I have more free time...
Will pick it up again to finish it when I have more free time...
March 16, 2008
A read this for my sabbatical project to develop curriculum for two new ESL pronunciation courses.
June 17, 2009
Probably the best textbook I have ever owned.
December 19, 2010
Thx Peter!
May 27, 2013
If you're going to read a phonetics textbook (big IF) then this is a good one. Learned a ton.
Currently reading
September 10, 2017help! how do I get to read the book?
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews