A while back I wrote a couple of posts (Learning to Pronounce English Words with the IPA and More About Learning Pronunciation) about how to use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to learn English pronunciation. In one of the posts I recommended the University of Iowa online IPA chart for English students. However, the University of Iowa chart is not perfect. For one, it is intended for phonetics students and, as a result, it is not very easy to use and navigate without a solid understanding of the IPA and phonetics.

What’s Roy the Zebra?

Roy the Zebra is a reading site for children that centers on a group of animal characters. The main feature of the site is the nine-part story of Roy’s escape from a zoo and search for his herd. There are also a lot of interactive reading games using the characters introduced in the story, and Roy-themed songs.

There are a number of creative ways that you can use Simple English Wikipedia to study English. Lets get the obvious one out of the way now: read. Reading is good. Find an article that interests you and read it.

Okay, now for some more interesting ideas. As I mentioned in Part 1, anyone can write and edit Simple English Wikipedia. As a result there are grammatical errors in many of the articles. While this is not a good thing, it does present a great opportunity. When you read Simple English Wikipedia articles, try looking for any grammatical errors and fix them. This is a good exercise for yourself and it helps others who read the article later.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the web. Right now, as I am writing this, Wikipedia sits 9th on Alexa’s list of the most visited websites in the world. Wikipedia has articles in over 253 languages, but, again as I am writing this, the number one language is English with over 2 million articles.
With its huge database of articles, the English Wikipedia is a great resource. However, Wikipedia articles are written in neutral language, which is not normally taught early in ESL/EFL studies, can be quite long, and are full of information. So Wikipedia is not the best for learning English.

Learning how to produce sounds in a second language is challenging with sounds that aren’t in your first language.

When teaching, I get uncomfortable when a student asks for help with pronunciation. My usual solution is to make certain the student can identify difficult sounds before trying to pronounce them. Once the student learns to identify the sounds, I find it difficult to teach the student how to produce the sounds.

How does this help you lɜrn ɪŋglɪʃ?

The letters at the end of the above sentence (they read “learn English” by the way) are from the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. The IPA is an alphabet that has a letter to represent every sound in every human language.

While it might take some time, learning the IPA gives you the ability to check the pronunciation of different words in the dictionary. This is a very valuable learning tool, particularly for people living in non-English-speaking countries.

Reading English is a challenge because most letters can make several sounds. There are many different ways of pronouncing each letter, many rules for governing pronunciation, and many exceptions to the rules of English.

The reasons for these challenges lie in the history of English. No language is completely isolated from the influence of other languages, but English has a large number of languages playing important roles in its development. As a result, reading English is one of the great challenges to learning English.