Phonetics Spelling Dictionary

A phonetic spelling dictionary is something that anyone can make to aid them in learning how to say the words they want to use. Anyone who's tried to learn a language knows that the way the language is spoken is, more often than not, extremely different from the way it looks on a page. One way to get around this is by creating phonetic spellings of every new word you learn. There aren't any hard-core rules when it comes to phonetic spellings of English words, but there are easy shortcuts and agreed upon conventions that can be put to use.

Why Create a Phonetic Spelling Dictionary

When learning a language as vast and as difficult as English, learning the phonetics of English at the same time is incredibly helpful. Studying the way a language sounds not only helps one's ability to communicate accurately, it also helps one remember the words because it ties the words to muscle memory. As your mouth moves to sound out a word, your muscles are learning those words as much as your brain is.

Repetition is the mother of mnemonic devices; it's also the midwife of boredom. Teaching yourself a language by writing words over and over again can get quite tedious, and if native speakers still don't understand you after all that work, frustration sets in. Creating a phonetic dictionary gives you something else to write down and study, and it helps you concentrate on pronunciation enough to go out almost immediately into the real world and put your growing vocabulary to use.

Many people are afraid of using new words because they think that they won't be able to bear the embarrassment of mispronouncing something. Almost everyone has encountered the discomfiture of having one's pronunciation corrected by a cruel colleague or friend. It's hard to forget, and it's hard to just let it go. By writing down the pronunciation in your own phonetic spelling dictionary, your risk of facing such mortification drops considerably, and your confidence might rise as a consequence.

How Do I Do It?

You can start out with some easy words and work your way into harder ones as you continue to amass a huge lexicon of phonetic mastery. Starting with words you already know will allow you come up with your own phonetic spellings. Since you're learning English words, you should probably use spellings that make sense in English. If you were learning Farsi or German, you would use their phonetic spellings. By working in the target language, you are also building spelling skills. Many words in English are spelled more or less phonetically already, and learning how letters work together in the language proves invaluable as you advance.

Start with ones you already know. "Dog-n-Dahg" would be a very simple entry. Notice how "ah" makes the long "a" sound. You can use the International Phonetic Alphabet or the Americanist Phonetic Notation systems, but it isn't necessary to learn a bunch of new symbols to learn the way a language is used. The effectiveness of respelling is fairly easy to accomplish, and it's more amusing.

Phonetic Transcription

Many people choose to master the International Phonetic Alphabet. It's a valuable tool when you're studying linguistics or you want to show off to your friends. Some dictionary websites use it to describe how to pronounce their entries. For most, though, the IPA is just a little bit TMI.

Too Much Information is the doom of many a learner of foreign tongues. Unless you're going to be a bona-fide linguist, there's really no need to have more than a passive knowledge of the IPA. It's easy enough to figure out, but the chart can be fairly off-putting, and there's just no reason to let anything get in your way of learning how to pronounce a language properly.

That said, a great deal of folks feel the need to stick to a tried and true set of rules when it comes to casual phonetics. If you are one of those people, there's a great article about it here. It even explains how to get your web page to show IPA symbols. If you're willing to spend the time getting the IPA into your head, you'll find it's pretty useful when speaking to other people who know it. It also makes for good conversation with pedants and autodidacts.

For the purposes of your own phonetic dictionary, just make sure you're having a good time. Writing "façade" as "fuh-sahd" is good enough, but if you like the extraterrestrial symbols of the IPA, go for it. Language has no dignity, so just have fun with it. Leave the serious stuff to the pedagogues.

 

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