Job Discussion Forums

[leosmith]

I'm taking the CELTA in a couple weeks, and plan to teach in Japan after that. Does anyone other than Cambridge use the symbols in this dictionary to explain pronunciation?

[fluffyhamster]

If you mean do other dictionary publishers use phonemic symbols, well, yes, those from UK publishers (which include Oxford (OUP), Longman and Macmillan besides CUP) all use pretty much identical systems. Dictionaries from Japanese publishers vary somewhat more (you can even get dictionaries with pronunciation indicated entirely in katakana). And don't get me started on American respelling systems! Grrr...

But you're probably asking if schools and students here are familiar with such symbols and/or expect you to be able to use or teach them. Hmm, well I've worked briefly in a non-chain language school, and was never asked about this by staff or students there (and when I did indicate pronunciation I probably used katakana more than phonemics). If however you work in high schools, some Japanese teachers of English might be a little shocked inwardly if you weren't too familiar with them (not that you'll ever be expected to use them in class - again, it's katakanaese, but this time non-native loving lashings of it).

So, bone up on it for the CELTA, but don't worry too much about lapsing back into haziness once you are here in Japan. One thing I would recommend you start reading around in is phonics - you never know, you might one day be expected and/or want to teach kids how to decode English without them using any "crutch" at all.

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

[fluffyhamster]

I was gonna say modified IPA but I didn't want to scare the OP off, or get phoneticians twitching.

[zignut]

This example from the link you gave is standard IPA as far as I can read it. Of course, it doesn't get into all the possible features, but with phonetics, the obscurity you can achieve in translation is near-limitless.

Learning the English phonemes in IPA is really easy. Almost all of the sounds resemble English orthography. It's much harder for anyone who, for example, happens to have /b/ and /s/ sounds in their language, but different letters.

Whether or not you end up really using IPA in class is another story. Though you may never teach directly from the set of symbols, the manner in which they're grouped in most representations is of great potential. Consider each sound by its place and manner of articulation, and you have the basis on which to teach a totally foreign sound to a non-native speaker of English. For example, we don't have /x/ in English, but by learning IPA, I know it's a (hope I get this right...) voiceless velar fricative, and so I have a rough idea of how to reproduce it, even though I've never learned any kind of semitic language.

Pretty cool stuff.

[fluffyhamster]

Would 'surruptitiously hawking up "throat cheese"' also accurately describe that /x/?

[Sour Grape]

Make sure you learn them before you come to Japan, if you intend to learn them at all.

If you are learning kana and kanji, the last thing you will need is another set of symbols to memorise.

I have hardly ever used them.

[fluffyhamster]

There's actually a sticky on the General Discussion forum about phonetic vs phonemic script, in which one writer pours scorn on the very idea of the latter (I was trying to recall that thread earlier); me, I've never had a problem with 'phonemic script' meaning 'those IPA symbols selected as appropriate for this variety of language', as another poster goes on to point out.)