Practice exercises

You can practice making phonetic transcriptions for the following sets of English words. Part of the screen will resemble a typewriter keyboard with phonetic characters on the keys. You'll be able to enter your transcription by clicking on the keys with your mouse. Clicking on the word in the left column will check your transcription. The "Symbols" button in the left column will show you a brief key for the vowel symbols and those IPA consonant symbols which are not the same as in English spelling.

But first! In order for this to work, you'll need to make sure that you have enabled JavaScript on your browser. If you're not sure how or why, a short explanation is here.

If the "typewriter keyboard" doesn't all fit inside its frame, you could try to:

readjust the frame boundaries with your mouse, making the top two frames thinner
choosing "Options" from the Netscape menu and turning off "Show Directory Buttons" (which is completely useless at the best of times). If there's still not enough room, try also turning off "Show Toolbar" and/or "Show Location".
complaining to me until I make smaller letters

If the program doesn't tell you your answer was right, it doesn't necessarily mean it was wrong -- just that it wasn't exactly identical to what it was expecting. You should be able to figure out how to pronounce the suggested transcription, how to prono unce your transcription, and how serious the difference between the two is.

The word sets:

As a band-aid solution for those of you who have been having trouble getting the typewriter to work on certain browsers, the following are the same word sets with no typewriter. You'll have to write your transcriptions down on paper before you click the word and see the answer. (Think of it as calligraphy practice.)