Am I the only one obsessed with IPA? (TL)

Maybe this is a weird hill to die on, but I genuinely think the International Phonetic Alphabet is the most underrated tool in language learning. I've been studying languages for years and the thing that always tripped me up was pronunciation, not vocabulary, not grammar. You can memorize 5,000 words and still sound completely off because the textbook never told you that the "r" in French isn't the "r" you've been making your whole life, or that the Spanish "d" between vowels is closer to English "th." Audio alone helps, but my ear isn't trained well enough to hear the difference until someone points it out symbolically. IPA fixed that for me. Once I learned the symbols (took maybe a weekend), every new word came with a pronunciation I could actually decode instead of guessing. Pair it with audio and pronunciation stops being a guessing game, you see the word, hear it, and see exactly which sounds are being produced. French (my current TL) is the perfect example: cœur [kœʁ] is impossible to guess from spelling, but the IPA tells you exactly what your mouth needs to do. But every time I bring up IPA outside of linguistics circles, people glaze over. "Too technical." "Looks like math." So I'm curious: Do you actively use IPA when learning a language, or do you skip it? If you skip it, what put you off? If you use it, what made it click for you? Genuinely trying to figure out if I'm in a bubble or if there's a quiet majority that finds it as useful as I do. submitted by /u/ArchiTechOfTheFuture [link] [comments]

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