You Need to Learn IPA (Here's How)

[00:00:00]Hey, what's up you Dess here from the mimic method and and today I'm going to show you how easy it is to learn the international phonetic alphabet and talk a bit about why you need to learn it. In fact, this should be the very first thing you do as a language learner. And part of what is causing me to make this video is that on September 1st, we are launching our new language learning platform. And in the demo videos I made last week, I show people what I call flow script. Right here, you can see this French person speaking and we break it down into this.

[00:00:43]>> Right? So, as you can kind of see probably by the movement, these correspond to the actual syllables that she's saying in real time. And when I click on them, Then you can see we're getting a really good grip on what is actually being said here. Now, if I use the normal spelling, I won't really see that as clearly because people don't speak the way that they pronounce. my own creation that shows how syllables flow together, but it makes use of the International Phonetic Alphabet where every speech sound gets one dedicated symbol and every dedicated symbol represents only one speech sound regardless of what language it is in. And the reason why this is so important is because across different languages, we will spell the same sound differently. So, for example, the shh sound is an sh in English, but it's a ch in French and is spelled differently in other languages as well.

[00:01:45]But in all languages, in the international phonetic alphabet, you would always use this symbol here, >> so this kind of um right here. So, that's what IPA is. Now, when people see these things in the first time, they have no training in it. They get intimidated.

[00:02:06]They say, "Oh, well, what's this weird looking symbol here? Why are there always till days here? You know, what's what's this arrow about?" They they get confused and they get intimidated and say, "I don't want anything to do with that. Just kind of give me something I already know." The normal spelling system. The problem is if you do that, you will be confused. You will confuse the sounds. You will mispronounce the sounds and misar the sounds as a result.

[00:02:27]So you you really want to do this just to make everything clean and clear in your ear, mouth, and mind. So don't be intimidated by this because in this new platform I'm launching on September 1st, I make it very easy for someone to learn. In fact, you can learn it probably in a day, max two days, all of the relevant IPA symbols for your target language. So I'll show you a demo of how we do that. This is actually an old old kind of proof of concept trainer I made.

[00:02:55]I don't have this embedded into the new platform yet, but it still demonstrates the main point here. I have for French all of the new symbols you would have to learn in IPA. So, most of the sounds you already know the symbols like the T with the letter T, letter P, right? You don't need to do much work to learn those because you already know them. However, you will need to learn this symbol and this symbol and this symbol and this one, right? So what we will have you do in the app is we break it down for you bit by bit. We introduce for example just the rounded vowels in French. We explain what a rounded vowel is. What is the what is rounding as an anatomical you know phonetic concept. You watch all these tutorials I give you on how to do that. Then we say great these are the three rounded vowels of French. Here is how you pronounce them. your tongue, your lips, and then here is the three IPA symbols for them. Yes, you don't know them now, but if you do this gamified drill, you will learn them very quickly, right? So, you can choose in the app bit by bit how you learn and differentiate. Right now, this is kind of a more down the line. If I get all the phone names selected >> and I start my practice w >> then >> you see I can hear this W sound and hear a bunch of words that have it.

[00:04:18]>> Way ww.

[00:04:24]What is the symbol for that? And like I said last time, this is not the final sound effect. We are just putting it as a placeholder while I sound engineer my own sound effects here. Now, if you're familiar with space repetition, what that is is a way of efficiently memorizing new things. If this was easy for me, I select easy and it removes it from the card deck. But if it was a bit challenging or I didn't get it right at all, then I would say good or again. And then that means it'll show it to me later. If I was like red, it show it to me like two or three cards later. And if it was yellow, maybe like five or six cards later. And that way now I know it.

[00:05:01]So if I say again, it's going to come up against later.

[00:05:09]W.

[00:05:10]>> So there's that W again.

[00:05:13]>> Right. So now I have it easy. I can take it out the deck.

[00:05:15]>> Did I get that right? Which one is this?

[00:05:17]I got that wrong. Okay. So this is the H. I listen to it.

[00:05:22]>> I hear words if I mimic it.

[00:05:24]>> L. My brain is associating this sound to that sound. Okay. Let's come back to it again. Y. Y. That's that >> e.

[00:05:36]>> Okay, there's that sound again. I think I remember this now.

[00:05:39]>> Boom. So, it's really that easy, guys.

[00:05:42]There's only a handful, like a dozen or so new symbols you need to learn. And if you just do the right teaching technique and learning technique, you can just get these things learned right away. prior to learning them, you're going to be mixing a bunch of sounds, spelling them in all kinds of weird way, probably not even realizing certain sounds are different than others. And that confusion sitting at the base layer of your knowledge of the language is going to haunt you at every stage thereafter.

[00:06:10]When I hear people trying to speak and understand and they trip over their tongue and they can't understand a when they talk fast and I drill down to what's really going on in their brain, most of the time it's just because they don't have the sounds clear in their head. And the reason why they don't have it is because they're still relying on the official spelling system instead of learning the international phonetic alphabet which cleans everything up. And then even better once you learn these symbols start to apply them in flow script and as I already showed before you we have a transcription game mode in the platform. So I can come, for example, and take that same soap opera French scene I showed you at the beginning of this video and then say, you know what, let me just practice >> transcribing every instance of the >> and maybe this W and this whenever those things pop up, >> I want to see if I can hear them in context, right? So I start the session and now all of those sounds have been blanked out of the script. And you can apply this to any script. We're going to generate a lots of songs, scenes. We'll produce our own little simple videos of people doing different grammar concepts or whatever. And I can go into any of those and say, "Okay, this symbol is really giving me grief or this sound is really giving me grief. Let me blank it out of everything." And then just try to practice it. So, here's a very same.

[00:07:47]>> Okay, here's that.

[00:07:57]>> Okay. And again, I'm doing these things fast, but you can always put this even slower to really hear it.

[00:08:05]Uh see so by in this gamified way actively transcribing selecting which one's which same different etc we pull out all the the cognitive tricks to get this information into your mind. Get it out of the way.

[00:08:22]You know it forever the same way you know the alphabet forever. But unlike the alphabet, this is going to be much cleaner, much more useful to you as a language learner. So the main moral of this video is that when you see me in these videos working with flow script and you know you see all these symbols and you're like whoa mimic method he da thing that's way too complicated for me I can't I'm not good at it forget all that just relax I'll probably have I'm still working out the pricing model for this app but n chance 99% chance I'm going to make included in the free version just having you learn all of the symbols so that everybody has that. I want to start that as just like a just a base level for all language learners whether you do my program or not. We all need to learn the international phonetic alphabet because language is just sound.

[00:09:15]All I'm doing right now, right now I'm on a rooftop in Germany and people, oh yeah, there's a bunch of German sounds they're making with their mouse. And if I don't know what those sounds are, or even worse, I think I know what they are, but I got it wrong because the spelling from my first language and the complications of the new language are all intermingled and confusing everything. I'm going to constantly struggle to speak and understand. We are just making sounds. learn the sounds and learn them well by learning a proper symbolic system to represent them. That is what we will do on September 1st when we launch this with whatever special promotions we're doing. So, please subscribe to this channel and like this video and let me know in the comments what you think, if you have any questions on this process, if anything was not clear from this video. But I really hope now after watching this that you understand that you can learn IPA very easily, very quickly, and as a result be very well set up for success for the future of your language. All right, thanks again for watching and as always, keep on flowing.