May 2024: The Phonetic Alphabet
This used to be mandatory learning in school, and I think the idea is pretty useful for somebody trying to learn languages. It's abbreviated "IPA", which I'm betting will be beaten out by other meanings for it in casual conversation. A lot of this is communicated using charts that map the movement of the mouth to create the phoneme in question. https://www.ipachart.com/ is a pretty convenient resource to learn the symbols and sounds.
The vowel chart might be slightly familiar to the reader. It requires perhaps the least amount of knowledge, since the labels make it pretty clear what position the mouth is meant to be in for the sound. They operate on a closed-open and roundedness scale. Obviously that's how one gets several different "o"s. As an example, the "o" in "oven" is more associated with with the closed "e", while the "o" in "owl" is more associated with the open "e".
More interesting is the chart for the consonants - or rather the charts - not the very least, because most alphabets don't really order them in any way. There's one for pulmonic and non-pulmonic consonants - along with the weird ones, and the affricative, which could be thought of as the combinations of several consonants. "Pulmonic" is probably best described as the "dry" consonant. This is very much meant as a contrast to "wet" ones. I'll let your imaginations do the work on this one. Affricatives are usually a combination of a "t" or "d" sound, followed by something that continues ringing afterward, like an "s" or an "f".
Under the consonants, one could divide the charts into sections of what kind of sound is generated along one axis. For example, plosives are sounds that consist mostly of air. 'p', 'k' and 'd' sounds are an example for this. The other axis is mostly determined by the space part of the mouth that the tongue interacts with. This is where the family of "bilabial" sounds comes from. In sum, a bilabial plosive is a plosive that is generated by both lips. In short: 'p', 'b'. Often there will be a hard and a soft version of the same sound. Those are generally just lumped in together in the same category. The broadest of these categories can be split into the bilabial, dental, palatal, velar and uvular, which move from lips, to teeth, to just behind the teeth, to the roof of the mouth, to the back of the mouth. Among the pulmonics, there is are a few more positions. I'm not sure if this is due to some bias, since non-pulmonics include clicks, and I'm at least intellectually aware of languages that use more than five clicks. Perhaps the chart would need to be expanded for some more obscure languages. Another fairly known concept should be the fricative, the other consonant that consists mostly of air, but is generally longer. Things like "s" and "f" sounds, but also "h" sounds come to mind. There are "lateral fricatives", which are the equivalent to sh/sch and zh sounds, but in sum there are 2 of these, so I tend not to think about them too much. Nasal sounds are usually variations on "m" and "n" sounds, and trills are "r" sounds, with an optional consonant attack. Taps/Flaps are more or less what they sound like. Technically, they feel like plosives, but are a little softer, as the mouth only really closes for a short moment, so little pressure can be built, and the (lateral) approximants are consonants where the tongue doesn't usually touch any of the other mouth parts, only stopping short of actually doing so. The English "r" is perhaps a good example, whereas the rolled "r" is very much a trill. These latter categories each contain three or four elements at the most, and so are often relegated to the "weird" part of most alphabets.
Non-pulmonics consist of clicks, voiced implosives and ejectives. Clicks are relatively straight-forward, whereas voiced implosives direct the airflow inward and ejectives does so outward. There's a separate table for the "freak sounds", diplomatically called "other symbols" on the chart. I can't really tell why they're there, except perhaps that the tongue does some wild things to produce them. They also have names like "voiceless epiglottal fricative", so technically they're well describable using the IPA vocabulary, they just don't fit as neatly into the (non-)pulmonics as the other ones supposedly do.
For anybody trying to study this as well, the tables are best checked on the website.
I studied the symbols with the good old flashcard method, if I wasn't already familiar with them. A lot of them get used in the standard Roman as well, probably to minimize the learning overhead. It's genuinely best to start with the vowels, because the classification seems relatively intuitive. But practice is usually best done in - well - practice. This means that I might as well include it into the language track stuff, whenever pronunciations become a relevant factor. This lets me move away from pinyin, and might become really useful for European languages. I'm probably not going to add any more languages to that page, if I'm not also willing to change up the format. Until then, I want to be fluent in the IPA, so I can better represent the sounds of the language without defaulting to the kinda-sorta English I've been using up to now.