【老外说】是一档以“摘访”老外为主的节目，搀扶帮助各人更好的领会中西文化差别，一窥英国人、美国人日常生活。每周一更新。本栏目合适精听/泛听。可做听写操练。
从小学一年级我们就起头学拼音啦。我们进修英语语音，也离不开音标那个东西，那么美国的小伴侣，也学音标吗？让我们一路来听今天的老外说吧！
本期老外来自美国。
Gwen
I heard you native speakers don’t really learn IPA, do you?
No. But I learned IPA as a theatre student. So we use, actors in theatre use IPA quite often.
Gwen
展开全文
You learned IPA. You use IPA for what?
For learning accents. So if we wanted to do a British accent we can read the IPA pronunciation of it.
Gwen
For other American people and British people, you don’t learn IPA. How do you learn pronunciation?
As a child we learn by our environment. The same as Chinese kids learn Chinese from their parents.
Gwen
But we do have something called “pinyin”. It’s just like a spelling tool. Like “b” and “a”, you put them together, it’s pronounced “ba” in Chinese of course. Do you have a similar one?
Yeah. You’re absolutely right. When kids learn the English alphabet (字母表), they also learn the sounds that the letters make. So “B” is for “bat”, and they may know the word already, so then they’re just associating the “bat” sound with the letter now.
Gwen
But sometimes we all know that English alphabet...of course A you can pronounce /eɪ/ and sometimes /ɑː/ and sometimes /æ/. So how can you tell...
I know. It’s just corrected as children learn to read in school. If they say for example, if they say tomb/tuːmb/, the teacher will correct them and tell them “no, the B is silent, tomb /tuːm/”. That’s how they learn. They don’t specifically learn phonics (拼读法). Maybe it’s changed. There was a craze for phonics with kids, but I’ve never learned phonics until I was in college.
Any American I know, would not know IPA. But also you have to understand that Americans don’s study other languages. That’s not in our culture. So that’s also another reason why we have no use for IPA.
Gwen
So do you think for English as a second language learners, do you think it's a good idea to just learn IPA, or do you think how you American people learn pronunciation can be the way for, for example, Chinese students to learn English pronunciation?
It’s kind of tough cause everything is a little individual.
I don’t teach IPA. But I do teach pronunciation using the letters we have in consonant(辅音) pairs, consonant vowel (元音) combinations. This is how I approach language teaching to adults.
However, for children of any era, so Chinese children, should be exposed (使接触)to the language, should learn by imitating (模仿)it. That means phonics may be a good tool or may be unnecessary. For adult students, I never say, “OK, say it like me”. I think that’s not beneficial to adults. So I will literally draw the tongue, where the mouth is, where the teeth are, where the jaw (下巴) is, because this is the technique that I use teaching professional actors to get a better American accent.
However, I live in Miami. I learn Spanish as an adult. So I’m bilingual (会说两种语言的). I understand learning another language. I recommend to my English learners here in Miami that are Spanish speakers that “you should look at phonics, you should understand phonics and why it’s used, why we have an IPA”. I don’t teach IPA, but I will show resources to learn IPA, because you may find it useful.
Some students find it useful, some students don’t. My idea is that, you already have to learn all the letters in the alphabet in English, I think it just get more confusing, now we have to learn a whole another set of letters to say a word. I would rather my students connect to the patterns (形式) that we can find in English. I know they’re not consistent (始末与一的), but they do exist.
Gwen
So IPA is not only for learning English pronunciation, it’s a tool for learning the whole languages around the world, for Spanish, maybe for French, for all of the languages in the world.
IPA is international, so yeah, all the languages, all the sounds that we make.
Gwen
But actually there’s another version solely for American pronunciation or British pronunciation. It’s called DJ (Daniel Jones), KK (John S. Kenyon Thomas A. Knott) phonetics. Have you heard of it.
No. I don’t keep on top of (对...洞若观火) phonetics. But Daniel Jones...
Gwen
DJ and KK. KK is for American pronunciation and DJ is for British pronunciation.
Daniel Jones
Wow, OK, amazing. I’m gonna go look this up. Thank you for letting me know this. It’s good to know, absolutely, definitely, good to know other resources.
Gwen
I’ve heard of IPA and I know it has over a hundred characters, so it’s a little bit hard to remember all of them. But for DJ and KK, there’re only 44(each).
Got you. They’re only making the English sounds. So that’s a great resource. You’re exactly right. The IPA alphabet is huge. Except for I use the schwa, the /ə/, cause there’s no other letter I can use that will make an /ə/ sound. So I definitely do the upside-down “e”. Religiously (非常认实地) do that sound. It’s the most common vowel sound in English.
欣喜不欣喜，不测不料外？
老外竟然没传闻过我们从小学就在学的音标，哈哈！
但是我们做为英语非母语的进修者，音标进修仍是需要的哦！
各人还想听“老外”说些什么？欢送留言哦
-等你很久啦！-
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