In the International Phonetic Alphabet it is probably the diphthong sounds that give people the most difficulty. Here is a comment from one of my YouTube viewers who it seems may be a bit confused about diphthongs and the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Roni says:
Well Roni, in the word Parent the we write the diphthong sound /eə/ with just the letter ‘a’. When we write the diphthongs with the symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet the diphthongs kind of have 2 symbols in their phonemes. In the case of /eə/. /e/ and /ə/. But we combine them because diphthong sounds are two separate sounds that we pronounce within the same syllable.
International Phonetic Alphabet
Remember that diphthongs and phonemes are a different set of symbols to normal letters. The letter ‘a’ in parent is pronounced /eə/ in ‘Parent’. But we can pronounce letters in English in different ways, that’s the hardest thing about it, its not phonetic. That is why we have the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. So that we can see which sounds to make the sounds and transcribe the pronunciation. But it is a separate system of writing to the normal alphabet. There is no diphthong in Parent when we write it in the normal roman alphabet because there is no such thing. Diphthongs do not exist in the roman alphabet only in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
In these videos on phonetics we are talking about the symbols and sounds from the IPA.
So, I hope that clears things a little bit, and everyone; What are the sounds that you have difficulty in pronouncing?
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