Alfred's IPA Made Easy: A Guidebook for the International Phonetic Alphabet

basics!

So glad I bought this! Easy to use and quick reference on my phone with the Amazon Kindle app. Very happy that I found it.

A International Phonetic Alphabet

I applaud this book’s attempt to make the IPA system more accessible to the public and believe it to be broadly successful in this respect. I also thought the charts were a clever way of displaying this simply, albeit underutilized.Sadly, I found some surprising inaccuracies that customers should be aware of, especially as the book already is already predicated on such limited information. The presentation and descriptions of the consonants [ç] and [x] are incorrect and presumably swapped unintentionally. It doesn’t help that the consonants are somewhat difficult to differentiate in isolation. Strangely, the example charts for both consonants are correct, rendering the mistake even more confusing for the average reader and is why I decided to post this review; either for them or the publisher/author to correct eventually.Aside the aforementioned, there were also several instances, mostly vowels, in which the chart omits words as examples in favor of stating “N/A”. Perhaps they fall outside the scope of standard pronunciation, which is understandable, but asterisks explaining this predicament could have facilitated their inclusion if no standardized words can.Overall, I really applaud the format and structure of the book. It is a great introduction to the IPA system, and very useful. But for that very reason, it is difficult to ignore the pages conflating the [x] and [ç] while mismatching the charts. I praise the inclusion of the five languages beyond English (Sp, Fr, Ger, It, & Lat) and appreciate the instructions articulated to describe certain vowels unique to French. Given that the IPA is inherently Latin-based, I understand the desire to include it. I was admittedly disappointed at the absence of Portuguese but perhaps the next edition will be improved upon!

Learning the IPA is STILL very difficult, but this book makes it feasible

Excellent reference, well laid out for kindle view and easy to understand.

I could see the merits of this book if it was published back in say 1996, when the Internet wasn’t prevalent. The content in here can be covered in a 5-10 minute read online.

Easy to reference. The examples are great. The online audio is awesome.