Your wife has them. :bouncy:
Iron lady
I thought you were smarter or more rounded than to make a statement like that. I may be wrong but, apart from academics and some English students or teachers, the universal phonetic language is useless.
Italian is as it is written
French has two exceptions - otherwise as written (ng and ll).
My Danish friends said ‘What could you possibly use this for if you were Danish - the only place for it is to try and match English sounds to Danish speach/spelling’ - a major task (and also regional)
IMHO universal phonetic language is an ‘English only’ tool.
I am sure no-one in their right mind tried to apply universal phonetic language to regional accents for some non-academic purpose.
It is a great tool to deal with the many curiosities in English spelling and speach, at an academic level - but do the people who think ‘dew’, ‘due’ and ‘do’ rhyme really care. Do they need to buy a different dictionary to get the right universal phonetic language to match their region?
And I never saw anyone try universal phonetic language on Chinese. I guess someone might have tried it as an academic exercise with Standard Mandarin - but who speaks that anyway?
Did you ever see a German (or some other native speaker with no English) ever use universal phonetic language to understand a non-English language?
For most ESL students the best pronunciation guide is the simplest pronunciation guide. They don’t need to waste their time with symbols that represent negligible differences in sound. There is nothing much wrong with KK but the way it is taught (by everyone but me of course).
Can I be your student too bob? :bouncy:
o.k.
ruguo women yong pinyin jiu keyi le bu shi ma? :bouncy:
他是我兒子.
Keyi.
Bassman ta hui jiang guoyu ma? :bouncy:
wo xihuan ni de mingzi bob yinwei ting qi lai xiang shi zhongwen de ba ba. ni shi yi ge ba ba ma bob? (I like your name bob because it sounds like dad in Chinese. Are you a dad bob?) :bouncy:
[quote=“rian”]Iron lady
I thought you were smarter or more rounded than to make a statement like that. I may be wrong but, apart from academics and some English students or teachers, the universal phonetic language is useless.[/quote]It’s not universal phonetic language, it’s International Phonetic Alphabet. It has around 200 symbols IIRC and is “intended as a notational standard for the phonetic representation of all languages” (from the wiki link below). Info here;
www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html
(check out the charts).
More info here;
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internatio … c_Alphabet
What you are probably confusing this with is one of the phonemic charts which are used to describe the phonemes of English alone and which are subsets of the IPA, such as the one developed by Adrian Underhill;
developingteachers.com/phonology/sounds.htm
This latter one is often called IPA itself, but it should be clear that it is not the whole IPA but just a subset, and that in addition it does not provide for broad transcription of the phonetic subtleties of regional accents but only for narrow transcription of the phonemes of English over a wide geographical area.
Further discussion of this topic on both pages of this thread;
[Should the use of K.K. be restricted?
(despite the heading of “K.K.” we go on to discuss the IPA, the Underhill chart, other such charts and regional phonemic differences).
Dui. Wo shi baba keshi xianzai wode erzi hao da. (Yes I am a baba but my son is very big now.)
[quote=“bob”]Wo shishikan yong pinyin xie zhege keshi wode pinyin buguo hao (I tried to say this in pinyin but actually my pinyin isn’t good enough).
Iron lady are you using upper and lower case letters to indicate tones? If so brilliant idea and how does it work? 
[/quote]
Sorry, Bob, been dashing back and forth and missed your post. :s
TOP (“Tonally Orthographic Pinyin”) is my own variation on Pinyin which uses upper and lower-case letters to indicate tone, as you have accurately noticed. It’s quite easy. Just use standard Pinyin, but:
1st tone: ALL CAPS (ZHUANG, MA, GAO)
2nd tone: lasT letteR capitalizeD (zhuanG, mA, dA)
3rd tone: all lower case (ma, wo, ben)
4th tone: First Letter Cap (Qu, Xiang)
The only changes that are needed is that in the rare case of a one-letter syllable (a, e) you have to double the letter (AA, aA, aa, Aa) to be able to express the tone.
I express neutral tone with an asterisk next to all lower case letters: ba*, ne* and so on.
[quote=“rian”]Iron lady
I thought you were smarter or more rounded than to make a statement like that. I may be wrong but, apart from academics and some English students or teachers, the universal phonetic language is useless.
[/quote]
Like any other system, you need to learn it (and IPA has a higher learning curve than most systems, because it is broad enough and detailed enough to represent ALL the world’s languages, including, for example, languages with tones, clicks, coarticulated consonants, and other exotica). But if you say “it’s no good except for English” you are only proving you know nothing about IPA.
Ironlady ni TIANcaI de* :
Wow! ni Shi Di YI ge* juEdE “TOP” Shi zhIde* Yong de!! Bob Wan Sui!! :bravo:
ta hao xing yun you ni zhe ge ba ba bob. wo dou mei you. :bouncy:
Ni meiyou baba meiyou haizi o. Hao kexi. Dui bu qi.
wo ba ba si le.
Zhen dui bu qi.
Ha, kan bob de pinyin feichang chili, yinwei zhongwen you henduo de tongyinzi(the same tone), suoyi zhi lianxi pinyin bushi henhao!