If you're confused about what those funny symbols I use in my Dialect Dissection articles are, worry no more. I've written up a crash course to learn the IPA. It's focused on decoding the names of sounds in the IPA so that you can look at the chart and learn the sounds yourself. I personally found learning the IPA to be empowering in a way - once you know the 'recipe' to making each sound, nothing but practice is stopping you from being able to make that sound.
This page is definitely a crash course. One thing I'd like to do in the future is to make a longer tutorial to learning the different sounds of the IPA, how to practice them, resources you can use, etc. Basically, an elaborated version of what's in the crash course. Ideally it would involve video since some of this stuff is really best explained using video. That would be a long work in progress, though, so far now I recommend checking out the crash course.
For those of you who already know the IPA, apologies! I'm trying to make this site accessible to both people already familiar with linguistic concepts as well as laymen, so sometimes I will make reference pages about topics that may be obvious to you but not so easy for someone just learning about this stuff. Don't worry, I'm not going to spend the next couple of weeks pumping out reference articles. In the meantime, those of you prior IPA fans may be interested in checking out some IPA scarves sold by All Things Linguistic. I promise, I'm not a shill for her - just excited.
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