Phonetics

3. The Need to Study Phonetics

Speaking and listening to speech comes so naturally. Have you ever consciously thought about what processes are involved in this? This is exactly what Phonetics aims to do. It aims to give a "systematic, conscious consideration of how speech sounds are made, what they sound like, and how they compare with each other.

There are many reasons for why we have to study phonetics among them we can mention:

1-To have the capacity to detect the right meaning of the words through the correct pronunciation.

2--To be able to understand the speech of other speakers and to be understood as well.

3-To improve our English pronunciation through producing an accurate set of English words. This can be done through the use the IPA Symbols (International Phonetic Alphabet).

Phonetics is the branch of linguistics that examines sounds in a language. Phonetics describes these sounds using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

The IPA uses a single symbol to describe each sound in a language. If a letter in a word is silent, there will be no IPA symbol used in the transcriptions.

The IPA can be helpful for studying a language, especially languages that use letters that are silent or have multiple pronunciations. Languages like Arabic and Spanish are consistent in their spelling and pronunciation – each letter represents a single sound which rarely varies. English is different. It has many letters with two or more sounds and many letters that are silent.Vowel Sounds

æ as in cab                                  e as in pet                       ɪ as in kit

ɒ as in dog                                   ʊ as in dug                      ʌ as in putt (like a southerner saying strut) 

ɪə as in fear                                 eə as in pear                    ɔɪ as in toy

aɪ as in buy                                 əʊ as in float                    eɪ as in hey

aʊ as in cow                                uː as in room                    iː as in leek

ɜː as in third                                aː as in arm                      ɔː as in pour

ə as in about

Consonant sounds

b: as in bad        k: as in cat            d: as in dog            f as in frog            g as in gas    h as in help

l as in leap        m as in man            n as in no               p as in pat            r as in rat      s as in sat

t as in tap          v as in veil              z as in zoo            j as in yellow          w as in wash    ʒ as in leisure

dʒ as in large     tʃ as in child            ʃ as in ship            θ as in thing           ð as in the     ŋ as in flyingʔ is a glottal stop.