In those videos, I go over a tremendously valuable tool known as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was created, naturally, by the French, who needed some way to deal with the fact that four of the five letters in haies (hedges) were silent (it’s pronounced “eh”). The phonetic alphabet they developed does two awesome things: it turns languages into easily readable sounds, and it tells you exactly how to make each of those sounds. In English, there are ten ways to spell the “oo” sound in the word too. In IPA, there is only one, always: u.
