Howdy?! 🙂
Last week we dipped our toes in the river of Phonemics to learn the pronunciation of the English alphabet; today, we are going to start with an introduction of what the phonemic chart is, define the elements of phonology and review concepts like phonemic transcriptions and more.
From personal experience…
As an English language learner, I had no idea what the phonemic chart was or what its purpose is; I remember learning the pronunciation of the words by listening to my teachers speak, or listening to music or by watching movies and simply mimicking the sounds of the words. The first time I got in touch with a phonemic chart was when I studied to become an English teacher.
To say that I was confused would be an understatement! There were so many symbols that I hadn’t seen before and others I could recognize, but I had no idea which sound they represented.
As you may know, every English speaking country has its own accent, which is the way that words are pronounced in different parts of the world (you may have heard of the British accent or the American accent 😉 ).
There is no such thing as an accent of a certain region being better than the accent of another region, what matters is that you, as a learner, adopt the accent that makes you feel comfortable in your speaking.
There are learners, like myself, who learnt English with the American accent simply because of our life’s circumstances, for example:
- Most of the teachers I learnt from only spoke in American accent.
- My country, Mexico, is closest to the US, and the migration flux and news and communications made it easier for the English of the US to be learnt here.
- The American accent, in theory, is easier to pronounce than British, Canadian, Australian, etc…
Also, there are learners like me who like an accent better than others, for example, my favorite accent is British, and I have been learning the standard British pronunciation with the help of the British Phonemic Chart 😉
If you find yourself interested in self-studying an accent different to the one you learnt with, this could be a helpful tip for you 🙂
Now, to the heart of the matter.
Phonology, Phonemic chart or phonemes?
The phonemic chart is, oddly enough :D, a chart that contains the phonems. A phoneme is the smallest representation of sound that we produce to pronounce a word. You can revisit here the alphabet pronunciation (añadir liga para el ling de how do you say), more specifically, the first four vowels; their pronunciation is one phoneme alone.
But this doesn’t mean that phonemes are everything. In phonology, a phoneme, or phonemes is one of four features that study the sounds of English:
Summing it up, phonemes are the written representation of the sounds of a language. These phonemes, or phonemic symbols, help us know and learn the correct pronunciation of a word. As I mentioned before, there is no such thing as a better accent than another, but the phonetic symbols help us know the difference between similar words:
Usually, online and printed dictionaries provide us with what we call “Phonemic transcriptions”, which are the written phonemes one after another to represent the correct sound or pronunciation of a word or group of words.
Here you have some examples of phonemic transciption:
Can you guess the correct words for the phonemic transcriptions above? Write them in the comments 😉
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