It’s how it sounds.

I have been trying to teach myself one of the six versions of the International Phonetic Alphabet today, but it’s a bit of a struggle.

See, the prof left a list (on the source website) of links to various websites we could use to help us learn the IPA we are using in class plus the boring mouth position stuff. This gave me (as it turns out false) hope that I would not have to generate my own exercises. I could just let a website do that for me.

Alas, no. All the websites linked to were terrible. Not only did they look like they had been created twenty years ago, but none of them actually had exercises. Instead, they had tutorials, and those are of no use to me because I have already had the tutorial for the subject – it was called Linguistics class. Now I need help with the practical.

The closest thing to useful was this “program” that said it could generate three different forms of exercise… if I was willing to hack a dozen HTML files in two dozen places to make it work.

That is, to put it lightly, an incomplete solution. I don’t lack the skill to do it – I know basic HTML – I’m just not willing to do extensive reprogramming just to make the damned thing work.

If I wanted to do that kind of thing, I would have stuck with Linux!

So, back to square one, I guess. There are probably more modern (and functional) websites that can do what I want them to do, and I will probably Google for them soon. But right now I am too disgusted and discouraged to do it.

And yet, because of the weird ways technology reprograms our brains, I now feel like I have to find a website that does it, because now generating my own exercises (something I was perfectly willing to do before investigating the prof’s list) would feel like defeat.

Dammit, I will make the world of technology do what it is supposed to do! The battle cry that drives nearly all technological progress, when you really look at it.

I am also having a problem with the exact IPA I am using. Right now, my best resource is this phonetic transcription website I found earlier. I was so glad to find it because it will be a huge help in making exercises for me to do and it gets everything exactly right for the IPA I am learning…. or so I thought.

But today, after feeding it a bunch of sentences then “reading” the phonetic transcription, I saw a symbol that I did not recognize and was not in my notes.

It’s the vowel sound in the word “long”. The symbol I get when I run that word (or anything else like it) is not in my notes at all, and what is worse, that sound doesn’t seem to me in my notes either, so I can’t even tell you what it SHOULD be.

This creates a rather vexing knowledge gap. I don’t know what the right symbol for that particular O sound is, and that means that if it comes up on Tuesday’s test, I am screwed. It must be one of the symbols I already have, but I can’t figure out which one.

And if, in fact, the chart in my notes is incomplete, when so is the official one on our course website. So I am stumped.

Oh well, I will pull through. whether or not I find a website with lots of exercises or not, I will somehow cram all the necessary knowledge into my brain. It’s just really irritating to have to deal with something which is illogical and incomplete like this.

It’s the vowel sounds that are hard to learn. The consonants are easy. Most of them are exactly how we use them in English (the symbol for the P sound is [p]) and the ones that aren’t have a clue (the SH sound’s symbol is an S with the lower half of a circle on top). The only counterintuitive one is that our J sound is actually J with the same half-circle on it (a diacritical mark call a hacek, pronounced “ha-check”). A plain J actually means our Y sound.

Yes, just like in Swedish.

But the vowels are killer. It seems simple if you just look at the chart, but when you are actually trying to transcribe, it’s hard to figure out what you are dealing with. I personally find it very hard to separate the vowel sound from its inflection. To me, the vowel sound in, say, “that” can sound very different depending on how it’s inflected in the word or in the sentence.

But according to the IPA we are using, all those inflections are attached to same vowel sound, and it’s hard for me to hear it. and I have a lot of trouble imagining uninflected vowel sounds. So it is going to be tricky for me to learn to use the right symbol.

Or read the right symbol, come to think of it.

Still, I am enjoying the process.

Went to see Zootopia last night with Joe and Julian. Loved it. I was so happy by the end of it that I felt like I was drunk or stoned. But there was this one scene…..

In it, the fox character, Nick, tells the story of how he was very cruelly bullied for being a predator and trying to join a Boy Scouts type organization. The people there lead him to believe he can be in the group, and he gets his Mom to buy him a brand new uniform she can barely afford because this time, for once, he was going to fit in.

Instead, they turn out the light, beat the shit out of him, and tell him he was an idiot for ever thinking they would let a predator join.

That’s pretty traumatic for anyone to see, but for me…. a fox… who thought he was learning to fit in as a Boy Scout only to have a bully tell him in no uncertain terms that everyone in the troupe hated him and that if he ever came back, the bully would beat him up….

Well, let’s just say it was triggering as hell. Just thinking about the scene in the movie brings it all back to me.

Holy shit, I had a horrible childhood. And everyone I told about it brushed me off because it was easier to do that than deal with me.

Looks like I have more of my past to process.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.