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As a non-native English speaker, I have never studied the IPA system in school before. I have seen the symbols before but I?ve never given much thought to any of it. Unit 13 is a great and interesting lesson as it allows me to study phonology in-depth, and grasp the idea of the importance of pronunciation. English learners tend to underestimate the importance of pronunciation mainly because they tend to mistakenly think that pronunciation is less important compared to other aspects of the English language such as grammar, speaking, understanding and etc. Pronunciation is vital to proper communication because the incorrect use of pronunciation inevitably leads to the message being misunderstood by the recipient. Pronunciation of the letter sounds in words, intonation carries in the message in a sentence, and the words that stressed on parts of a sentence will more often than not change the words meaning and context drastically, thereby irreversibly altering the meaning of the sentence being communicated. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a universal system of one set of phonetic symbols for English. Since the IPA is included in every dictionary, students can use the dictionary to sound out any English word, using the phonemic alphabet. Because the fundamental principles of the IPA are simple and easy to use, everyone can apply the IPA to transcribe sounds when learning English language.
