How to learn the IPA (part 1): accelerate your language learning
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- Опубліковано 10 вер 2023
- You asked where to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet, I listened. This week, we start with consonants.
This is the secret superpower for linguists, polyglots, language learners, actors, and anyone who works with language.
patreon: / languagejones
IPA Chart (from the International Phonetic Association) with audio: www.internationalphoneticasso...
#languagelearning #language #polyglot #linguistics #listeningskills
Ok I’ll bite the bullet and finally learn IPA instead of always saying I will.
😂😂😂
YES!!!
It's been four months. Read this:
“Ɪn ðæt dɪˈrekʃən,” ðə Kæt sed, ˈweɪvɪŋ ɪts raɪt pɔː raʊnd, “lɪvz ə ˈHætə: ənd ɪn ðæt dɪrekʃən,” ˈweɪvɪŋ ðiː ˈʌðə pɔː, “lɪvz ə Mɑːtʃ Heə. ˈVɪzɪt ˈaɪðə jʊ laɪk: ðeə bəʊθ mæd.”
“Bʌt Aɪ dəʊnt wɒnt tə ɡəʊ əˈmʌŋ mæd ˈpiːpl,” ˈÆlɪs rɪˈmɑːkt.
“Əʊ, jʊ kɑːnt help ðæt,” sed ðə Kæt: “wɪər ɔːl mæd hɪə. Aim mæd. Jɔː mæd.”
“Haʊ duː jʊ nəʊ Aim mæd?” sed ˈÆlɪs.
“Jʊ mʌst biː,” sed ðə Kæt, “ɔː jʊ ˈwʊdnt hæv kʌm hɪə.”
Me right now 😩
Me right now
Polyglot and professional vocalist here, learning the IPA was obviously beneficial to my language learning, but fewer people know that it is also instrumental to singing too. When you think about it though, it is very intuitive, as singing demands you make a variety of often challenging sounds, and moreover sustaining them (as opposed to in speech, where you don't usually hold a sound for a long time). It was super helpful for me to learn about the position of my throat and tongue to optimize my sound and projection for different vowels, and better articulation for consents, especially those not in the languages I'm fluent in.
Playing the flute has helped me with some foreign language sounds because it relies on several odd mouth movements too.
I find that playing the skin flute professionally has improved my glottal stops and rhotics quite a bit.
As a speech language pathologist, I had to take phonetics in college. It has helped me so much with learning how to pronounce different languages and accents. Even if I don't know the perfect symbol to represent a given phoneme (sound), it's usually enough to help me remember how to pronounce the word.
Isn’t it great? And there’s also pronouncing people’s names
@@languagejones6784 Yes, for sure!
I've got a question: if our vocal folds do not vibrate when we whisper, then how was it possible that I can still hear and feel the difference between voiced and voiceless sounds when I whisper them????
I mean, of the only difference between voiced sounds and their voiceless counterparts is the vibration in our vocal folds then they should all sound the same when we whisper, yet they feel and sound different, why is it? Is there anything I'm missing here maybe???
@wagnerjunior6524 My first thought is context. You understand all or most of the whispered message, so your brain is able to fill in the missing pieces when part of the message is NOT clear.
Also, if you can still feel the vibration of your voice, maybe you are speaking a little bit louder than a whisper.
Just finished a Linguistics class for a masters. This is so great, so so great.
I can attest to this advice. One semester I took a speaking class for communications credit and we learned IPA. I learned how to make every sound the human mouth is capable of producing. The next semester I took Arabic, Chinese, and Korean... all A's!
did you experience any trouble learning chinese and korean together? you know, because they're so similar. i am interested in picking them up both at once, but i am scared of confusing them.
@maryyammar they are not that similar. Different grammar structures, different vocabulary, different writing system, chinese is tonal and korean is not. Both are pretty difficult though.
@@bigfat4172 They have many cognates, also shared in Japanese.
You could argue that the Korean writing system (hangul / 한글) was a similar (yet less universal) earlier attempt at one-symbol one-mouth-shape. This system was developed in the mid fourteen hundreds by King Sejong the Great (세종대왕). In fact the shapes of the "letters" are intended to demonstrate the proper mouth-shape. For example the "ㅁ" is pronounced like an "m", and is supposed to show the shape of the lips pressed together. Of course once you get beyond the beginner level you find there are sooooo many "sound change rules" that the simple 1:1 mapping of symbol to mouth-shape only holds like 75% of the time. That being said, it is still leaps and bounds easier than English.
It’s weird how people esp white people talk about Hangul like it’s some sort of revelation
Hangul is somewhat featural, but it's not like its purpose was to give a universal system. It's completely bound to Korean phonology and phonotactics
@@Karamazov9because it is a sort of revelation for those unfamiliar with it.
@@Karamazov9Hangul is intentionally designed to be easy to learn. It is quite unusual for such a writing system to actually become common.
There's also just a really satisfying "click" when a native English speaker learns the rules of Hangul... it looks complicated at first, but is so simple compared with the mess which is English spelling.
FWIW: I suck at languages.
@@satanissima white people sometimes have main character syndrome.
I think in the broader sense it still speaks to how white people see non whites, like they're a backdrop for us to explore. If it were just a personal revelation to finally understand something, that doesn't have the same racist connotations as like wow nonwhites did something impressive! or as if the white person has made some discovery.
I'm going to share this with every beginning conlanger who thinks they don't need the IPA or that the IPA is too hard from now on lol
YES!!!
If I remember correctly, the greyed ones are the ones that were deemed physically impossible and the missing ones are ones just not used in any known dialect.
As for a bilabial flap, I would think it would be an unaspirated pop, like when you put your finger in your mouth and pop it out.
I teach the Irish language. I find the IPA indispensable for teaching the sounds of the language properly. The Gaelic languages are unusual in that one of the most characteristic features of the (three) Gaelic languages is that all consonants (except h) have distinct ‘slender’ (palatized) and ‘broad’ (velarized) qualities. Also, in Irish, for many various reasons, the first sound of a word often changes from plosive to fricative (lenition), or from unvoiced to voiced, or voiced to nasal (eclipsis). Sometimes, a voiced consonant in the middle of a verb is pronounced unvoiced (which indicates the future or conditional tense). Without a knowledge of basic phonetics (with the help of the IPA - or at least a consonant table indicating ‘where’ and ‘how’), teaching and learning these sound ‘mutations’ is laborious and makes little sense. With the IPA as a reference, it is easy.
I always wanted to learn Irish, I love the country, the culture, the music, and the people!
@@nicolao.dos.santos And the language is amazing, too. (And in many ways, Irish is more closely related to Portuguese than English.)
@@nicolao.dos.santosI haven't always, but I do want to learn Irish.
I distinctly remember what a white guy said, probably a guy of Irish descent, and probably learning it for the 1st time: "This feels so natural.". I reflect on that often, and assume that languages are strongly influenced by our genetics which influence our comfort levels.
I'm so thrilled with this comment section for the quality of conversations happening here! What a cool thing to share and a perfect use of IPA. I had no idea Gaelic consonants have this feature. I'm excited to go down a youtube rabbit hole listening for this now
I agree about finding comment sections. 🙂@@angelareed225
Corrections:
1. voiced retroflex fricative is usual in transcription in Chinese, and it is sometimes non-standard variant of Standard Mandarin, however the more common variant is actually an approximant. Even sinologists mistake it a lot, so it's okay.
2. you pronounced palatal plosives like affricates and more front as t͡ɕ alveolo-palatal affricates (not palatal or palato-alveolar) . You did it for other palatal consonants as well, Japanese ny- does not have a standard IPA symbol, but is quite different from romantic gn (which is palatal). In Japanese, Korean, Russian, Chinese, it's common to use alveolo-palatal fricatives ɕ and ʑ
Everything else is perfect and comprehensible, good job!
I started learning about the IPA because of conlangs and have used it for reference since then. It made me realise how "uncomplicated" my own native language is because we don't use diphtongs for individual letters like it happens in English or other languages. We pronounce the letter A like an A, not an AY for example. The sounds and grammar rules are pretty consistent (for the Standard version of the language at least).
What is your native tongue? Now, I am interested :D
4:16 Place, Manner, and Voicing 5:17 Aspiration (spit, pit) 6:55 Overview of the chart 7:10 Rows 7:40 Columns 8:36 Plosive 10:10 Fricative s z 10:33 Nasal 11:19 trill 11:45 L/lateral approximate 12:10 labiodental fricative f v
12:45 less common sounds (from perspective of a native English speaker)
13:23 bilabials 14:14 labiodental 15:07 dental 15:43 Alveolar 16:23 postalveolar 16:36 retroflex 17:12 palatal 18:19 palatal lateral approximate like λ in χιλιόμετρα 18:23 velar 19:07 uvular 19:50 pharyngeal 20:16 glotal
@@dianagumas3777 sheesh okay diana go off
Hey Language Zaddy, great video. When you get to that video (3?), can you _please_ explain what the upstep, downstep, global rise/fall symbols mean? So many "Learn the IPA" guides I've seen over the years completely skip those and the tone marks. It took me ages to understand how the tone diacritic marks work (the tone characters are easy though).
YES! The tone diacritics are great.
I died when you showed Jadzia for the trill, then died harder when you showed the symbiont lmao. Looking forward to the rest of the series (of IPA, not DS9!). Thanks
😂 my channel is 1/3 linguistics, 1/3 Star Trek, and 1/3 throwbacks and R&B
@@languagejones6784 I enjoy all 3 thirds!
"Where/how/vibe check" is a perfect recall device. Brilliant.
AND
Yes, please re minced oaths!
2 things
1. I would love to see you try to pronounce an alveolar fricative trill also known as Ř in the Czech language.
2. When are parts 2-4 coming out?👀
IPA is my love language. I love the precision with which it describes and denotes sounds. So much better than “a distorted r sound,” which is narshkeit.
Note in some languages combinations of two IPA characters are needed. For example Polish t͡ʂ (affricate) is different than just tʂ said one after another.
There are also combinations of places of articulation like alveolo-palatal ɕ. You can have double trouble: t͡ɕ (alveolo-palatal affricate).
Sounds t͡ɕ d͡ʑ t͡ʂ d͡ʐ are a 100% indication someone is a native Polish speaker.
I was trying to save all the diacritics for the third video, to keep it as simple as possible at the start. I’m definitely excited about getting to those, and same for the vowels (Australian “no” will be involved)
@@languagejones6784, yeah, nah, really, mate?
@@Tim_Sviridov i think "australian no" probably refers to how some australians say "no" that sounds to some people as "naur"
@@notwithouttext quoi? Nah, mate. Nobody here says it with an r at the end. Or for that matter, the "нау" part.
(And yes, I get that that you were trying to write "nah". I am making fun of English's inability to spell.)
@@Tim_Sviridov no, i DO mean naur, with a distinct r-sounding approximant at the end. only a few young australians say it, though, and only in some regions. so maybe nobody THERE but there are some. geoff lindsey has a good video about why some australians say naur
I've been waiting for a video like this for a while! Great job!
Welsh pronunciation was correct! Great job
Man, I was so excited for the next video. Only to find out this isn’t an old series but a new one. Guess you got a new subscriber!
So glad you are doing this series!
I am currently learning IPA as a new linguistics student! I look forward to more of these!
Very handy for Japanese ん. Not just an "N" sound.
I love this! Hope you will continue the series.
I love your humor, these videos are great!
This is exactly the video I've been hoping that you'd make!! Thank you, Zaddy 😝
Thank you so much for all of your videos, but this one in particular. I would love to see follow-ups in this series.
I’ve actually been thinking of this a lot recently. Until now most of my languages have been in characters or the romance languages, but Russian is in Cyrillic and it’s a new perspective for me.
Fantastic explanations here, very excited for the rest of this series.
Awesome video! Definitely sharing this with my students…
Great video! Very inspiring! I`m ready to try...again!
Thanks for the IPA review, it's been so long since my phonetics class in college!
fantastic explanation. have been waiting for part 2 ever since this video came out!
Great video, upcoming ones will be really helpful as a linguistics student (Spanish philology). The video about those curse expressions you mentioned sounds like a great idea!
IPA was life-changing for me. Glad more people are learning it!
Dear Dr Jones
Thank you for this awesome video *big up IPA*!!! It must have been a lot of work to put that together, thinking of ways to explain it simply and adding your fantastic humour (you got me laughing out loud!) THANK YOU!
Looking forward to the next vid (totes excites)
This has been so much more useful than diagrams. Thank you!
Can't wait for the vowels - I have never been able to figure out the IPA chart. I'm sure your excellent explanation will sort me out.
Outstanding video. You sir are a natural teacher. Subbed of course.
I had to skip a linguistics class a couple weeks ago and this came out the same day. After watching it I was like two lectures ahead. Love your videos!
Very true, dear Sir-however, in many cases, the people who make the language resources and dictionaries seem to have an aversion to using it!
More of this series please!
I found that my mothertong helps a lot when pronouncing. It is serbian and when you use cirilic writing there are 30 letters and 30 sounds, completely phonetical. However there are words with differences in meaning if the vowel is long, short, or the accent is ascendent or descendent. 😊
This explains how my Italian relatives Di Maio had their name spelled Di Mayo, Di Majo, and Di Maio. Thanks for the lesson!
I was really proud of myself when I figured out how to pronounce ق and ع
Me too!
I already know it pretty well, might as well round it out!
2minutes in and this is already absolutely masterful. Thank you Doctor Jones
Thank you so much for this video, it's really easy to understand 🙏
We learned some IPA in school to be able to read the English dictionary (English is a second language for us). It's been a very valuable tool for learning foreign languages, especially since a lot of good dictionaries also include the IPA transcription.
Thank you for this series!
I'm taking phonology right now and this is so useful. Thanks!
We English speakers are familiar with the glottal stop in the middle of "uh-oh," but for us mid-westerners, we don't drop the "t" at the end of "flight, "night," etc. In fact, we lean into them making the "t" quite prominent. And when we do, the "gh" before the "t" becomes a very slight glottal stop. If you whisper those words, you can easily feel the closure. That's all that is left of whatever my German ancestors were gargling in the back of their throats. 😉
Great video. Can't wait for the next one.
Thank you for this. Really nice introduction.
this is amazing. excited for the next video
Thank you! I requested sources for learning the IPA in a comment just a week ago and you already have a video recorded just for me. Such great customer service! 😊
It’s a surprisingly popular request!
I love your demonstration of the glottal in the word bottle. It sounds just like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins.
You're amazing thank youuuuuu
I was introduced to the IPA when taking 'History of the English Language', which covered English in various froms, from Old to middle to modern. Very helpful, though I wish I'd paid more mind to it at the time.
This video is awesome!
Oooo... yes please! A video on minced, oaths, and taboos 😊
I'm a Pennsylvanian, living and teaching in Norway for 35 years. I used IPA regularly. It was indispensable for teaching the deaf and hearing impaired to hear and pronounce both Norwegian and English. Enjoyed your video. I will subscribe.
Great video as always!
IPA! Hooray!
I hope everyone is as excited for it as you are! I've gotten a lot of requests for it, but I've been afraid it would be too technical.🤞
@@languagejones6784IPA? too technical? prople need to read
I've made a big effort on this IPA alphabet thing this year. I haven't met linguistics students who are actually good with languages until very recently but this seems very useful, especially if you don't have the best ear like a musician but rather can drill movements like an athlete.
( The example pronunciations provided by linguistic students and conlangers on wiki and youtube seem very silly and not very useful though (it's something that's meant to be, as I understand it, descriptive of how natives speak in terms of place/s of articulation, not prescriptive. So I'm dabbling in all these languages just to build my IPA mental audio database esp for vowels and it's exhausting. )
Looking forward part 2
Excellent video, thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Wow, right on the spot. Ive started watching your series recently and seeing how much you are using it i started going trough Wikipedia page about IPA. Now there is brand new series covering it, right before I start a1 course on Spanish.
I realized at a certain point I can’t make the videos I want to in the future without it, andI shouldn’t just keep telling people to learn it on their own
I was forced to learn the IPA aged 10, I hated it back then and appreciated when learning the additional 5.5 languages I speak today (decades later) and many additional ones I dipped my linguistic toe in. I highly recommend it. And your explanation is brilliant.
In South Africa and Zimbabwe the word "bed" is pronounced as is..b-E-d as in egg (British English), as pronounced in British alphabet. Americans say b-AIR-d for bed and r-AIR-d for red.
"Different 'mouth shapes' cause different 'mouth sounds' to come out of your ''mouth hole.'" --Dr. Taylor Jones
But I tease the hot genius! 😅
A wise friend of mine always encourages me to use simpler words wherever possible - “If you can’t explain it without jargon, you don’t really understand it”
Can't wait for the next parts.
ɡreat video i appreciate how they went from easy to more difficult (for english speakers)
at 13:45 they say that bilabial tap / flap is impossible but im fairly sure it is its just not a part of any known language, that's why the box isn't shaded in.
Actually, the empty white cells on the IPA chart are possible sounds that we can make, but we don't know of any languages that use those sounds to distinguish one word from another, while the empty grey cells are sounds that are impossible or highly unlikely to be produced by a human given our anatomy.
Fascinating!
I love your jokes and humor! Your videos are so fun to watch! As I am sure you are aware, because voice onset TIME determines the “vibe,” the third question can simply be about time: “When?”
Maybe not as fun as the way you put it, but it helps me remember the adverbial phrases that answer those same questions: adverbial phrases of location/manner/time. I wonder why we like to describe things in language that way. Are these three the only important questions for communicating about parties? Why don’t we ask who or how much?
4:12
I like your videos a lot and we share the same passion. I am having a lot of fun with mandarin and I am starting arabic. Dindi is pronounced djindji by maybe the majority of Brazilians, in Portugal however it is pronounced dindi. Keep up the good work!
The one model on Forvo sounds like something on the lines of /dindʒɪ/.
Cant wait for part 2!
It's been 24 hours. Get part 2 out already!
This is invaluable for worldbuilding as well :)
There’s so much I wanted to discuss that I need this for first! Can’t get to historical change without distinctive features, can’t do distinctive features without IPA
Excellent video, as always! I've always thought the consonants on the IPA were rather transparent (you did a great job explaining it) BUT I never could understand the vowels... looking forward for the news one!
We’re gonna have so much fun with that! I LOVE the vowels. There are sounds in French that I had to learn by triangulation…literally getting height/backness/and rounding one at a time by using other vowels I know, and then dialing it in once I was in the neighborhood. I still have an accent but it’s a LOT better. Listen and repeat wasn’t gonna cut it
The explanations of producing different sounds are great - very clear and straightforward. The spoken demonstrations become confusing, however, when examples of of voiced versus unvoiced items sound identical. Both seem highly voiced. What am I missing ?
THANKS!
I met you in grand central in late 90s or early 2000s (you were heading to grad school in a month or two) and loved your view on language and ended up buying rosetta stone in Russian Spanish German and Chinese.
I am so pleased you found such a great career.
Never tried German and shelved Chinese but Russian and Spanish were helpful.
Question: where can I travel to that speaks primarily russian so I can experience it in the real world. Also I have never been able to pronunce numerals like 20 30 even 5 properly and would like tips as Duolingo also agrees I cannot handle these sounds
Thanks for being awesome.
THANK. YOU.
The one issue I have with using IPA for language learning is that a lot of resources copy the professional linguist's tendency to use the symbol /r/ to represent rhotics. Linguists do this in places where the exact pronunciation doesn't matter - for instance, when using IPA to represent a language the reader doesn't necessarily need to know while demonstrating a point about syntax - so it's fine for them, but the actual rhotic(s) in a given language can be a number of actual phones, like /ʁ/ in French or both /r/ and /ɾ/ in Spanish. (And then there's Arabic that uses /r/ as a rhotic but also has /ʁ/ as a separate consonant.)
On the other hand, it's been a huge help in learning to pronounce sounds like /ʕ/ and /q/ in Arabic (though the phonotactics still screw me up in /ʕiraːq/) and Welsh ll /ɬ/ (yes, I can now impress my friends (and little else) by saying /ɬanvairpʊɬɡwɨŋɡɨɬɡɔɡɛrəχwərndrɔbʊɬɬantəsɪljɔɡɔɡɔɡoːχ/)
The IPA is a fascinating subject/tool so thank you for introducing me to it. I would love to see a practical application such as "Irish accent" vs "Southern US accent" or a college friend meant to say, "Merci beaucoup" but said "merci beau cul." While I can hear the difference and can produce the sounds I am not sure how IPA shows them. (I have not watched past Part 1, please forgive me if these are addressed in later episodes.)
please part 2!
I've known about the IPA for years but never found any good explanation of how to read it. Until now! Thank you very much.
You’re welcome! I’m excited to continue the series and get into combining everything
I think the IPA can be very useful, but as an MA TESOL student I would like to point out that, at least in English, there are a lot of issues with the IPA transcriptions used in English dictionaries. American dictionaries used to plagiarize British dictionaries, so there are tons of instances where even now American words will be transcribed with phonemes that only exist in RP, (strut vowels in the place of schwas, for instance) as well as phonetic transcriptions based on outdated views of English phonology or as the product of one side of a phonological debate vs the other. IPA isn't uselss or bad to learn, but you also gotta keep your ears open to the sounds speakers are actually making!
Sounds like you’ve been watching Geoff Lindsey’s videos. Or if you haven’t, you should, because that’s something he talks about a lot.
@@artugert I have (that's why that's the example I used haha) but it's not the only example and the difference between what's in reference materials and what's in the actual language is a constant theme in my classes. Seems like Dr. Jones agrees, given one of his latest videos implores people to start listening to real stuff as fast as possible haha.
I think analysis can be a useful supplement but the language is ultimately the language. I think the more you spend time in analysis mode using learner materials, the deeper you're putting yourself into a sort of platonic language cave.
@@uchuuseijin Yeah, I think it depends on how you use the IPA. Since there are many accents and ways of pronouncing words, there are many possible transcriptions for any given word. I'm not sure, but I would guess some words could have dozens of possible (close) transcriptions. A person learning English as a second language will need to get a feel for all the various ways a word can be said, otherwise they will understand one accent but not all the others. Of course, for speaking, they will probably be learning one particular accent, such as General American, but even within GA, there are many nuanced differences in people's speech patterns. Eventually, they will have to develop their own preferences and their own voice. So, yeah, I agree. The IPA is a helpful tool for beginners in a language to understand what is actually going on when a particular sound is articulated, but it can't be relied upon for a perfectly accurate representation of speech. Eventually, you need to rely on your own ears and your own tongue, lots of practice and (at a more advanced level) perhaps a bit of intuition.
Would love to see a video on minced oaths!
I’m finally getting around to watching this series.
I thought the series was complete, but I can’t find the other videos on your channel. Did a UA-cam update mess up your playlist settings? Have you not done your video on vowels yet?
Thanks. I love your content
A couple things: Beijing/Standard Mandarin r is actually an approximant, so the same sound as English r, but without all the rounding and pharyngealization BS. Mandarin x is actually the palatal sibilant fricative instead of the one shown here.
I also remember French or German actually having a uvular approximant for r, and some Arabic ayin being a pharyngeal approximant
When you said the ʕ at 20:05, it sounded almost exactly like a native dane saying 'regn' (rain) 🌧
13:52 Actually, you can make a bilabial tap or flap, and it’s used in one or two languages. It’s just that in those languages, it’s an allophone of the labiodental tap/flap, which is more common and basically the same thing, so it doesn’t get its own symbol.
17:55 I think Mandarin actually has an alveolo-palatal fricative. Standard Japanese has a palatal fricative, as well as an alveolo-palatal fricative that contrasts with it.
This is excellent. I can't make all of the sounds to my satisfaction, but I could get most of them pretty close. Probably look and sound like a maniac doing it, but that's fine.
Sorry, I know you sound completely crazy. When I was learning the IPA, I used to walk home from work muttering the letters to myself. I remember learning ʁ and sounding like I was gargling. All the neighbours hated how their dogs started howling as I came by
You just reminded me: I once went to see Don Ringe, who teaches historical linguistics, in his office. When I got there, he was pacing back and forth reading some manner of incantation in Akkadian. I slowly backed away.
Duuuuuude, just came across this video and am devastated to find out it's 7 months old and there's no part 2!!?
no WAY he didn't gives the next part???
Also, Dr., I would like to suggest making this some kind of TsikTsok challenge where people film themselves trying all these mouth shapes 😂 i just caught myself and thought it would be a hilarious challenge and get you more well deserved exposure 💕
I noticed a certain type of 'v' in Georgian yesterday (in the word 'ბავშვი', where it appears twice, making it sound more like 'baushwi' than 'bavshvi' to an English speaker, at least via the pronuncation of that person), and I guess I generally understood what was going on when I heard it pronounced, but you've clarified for me that it's 'approximant'.
"Like the A in father" is one of my personal bugbears - in the UK you just have to travel a couple of dozen miles to find several different ways to say that damn A.
As a northerner it irritates me when you read 'a' as the 'u' in 'cup'. Madness. Or should I say mudness.