Alfred's IPA Made Easy: A Guidebook for the International Phonetic Alphabet

by Anna Wentlent

How many years has it been since your last diction class? This handy guidebook is an easy reference for the symbols used in what they look like and how they are pronounced. Example words for every symbol are included in English, Latin, Italian, German, French, and Spanish. And an online resource includes recorded demonstrations of every sound. A clear and concise tool for singing in foreign languages, equally useful in the choir room and the vocal studio.

Genres: Language, Linguistics

64 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2014

Reviews

[sophie spindler · Rating 5 out of 5]

so amazing really good and helpful ipa is not beer it’s international phonetic alphabet #choir kid

[Philip Copeland · Rating 1 out of 5]

A good concise introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet for singers, but they confused the German ichlaut and achlaut. A basic textbook like this can’t make that kind of error.

[Lucian Gabriel Teodoriu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nu explică deloc clar cum se pronunță sunetele din AFI.

[Bry Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really found this short book to be useful. Linguistics is just a part-time interest of mine. Occasionally, I need to resort to using IPA notation to correct text to speech functions as phonemes for Amazon's Polly. This book provides each notation with one word from each of 6 represented languages—English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish—, where the language has a corresponding word. In some cases, a sound is unique to one or two languages, so the other languages simply have an n/a.

What was nice to me is that I could use my primary language as a guide to better grasp the commonality of the sound in a word in another, e.g., the ε of the English bed and the French bête. As French is a secondary language, I could use it as a reference where English had no representation. I found myself subvocalising each of the presented terms on each page.

There is a free, open-access online companion with an MP3 audio file for each page that pronounces the sound and each of the words present on each page: http://alfred.com/ipamadeeasy