Someone designed a game to test your IPA skills. (You should realize that it’s broad transcription, so the R’s are right-side up, for example.) My only problem was actually spelling the words correctly in normal human spelling! If only English had followed Shaw’s lead to simplify spelling!
The International Phonetic Association is master over the International Phonetic Alphabet—the IPA. Here’s their website: http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/
Why might learning the IPA be useful for actors? I have two main reasons that I teach it to my students (other than just to make them suffer as I had once suffered, much like the ongoing practicing of having doctors do a residency… What up with that?)
If you need to type just a little bit of IPA (International Phonetics Alphabet) and don’t want to download and install a whole font package and learn how to work with it, you can use this webpage to create the phonetic phrase—and then copy & paste it into your document. It’s a little odd, the simple things that excite me…
