Requirements (what you need to use the site)

Here's a short list of the things you need on your computer in order to use this site most effectively:

• a Unicode font that covers the IPA range of characters

  In order for your browser to draw all those cute little phonetic symbols, you'll need at least one of the following three fonts installed on your computer:

  1. Gentium, which you can get from SIL's Gentium page
  2. Doulos SIL, which you can get from SIL's Doulos page
  3. Arial Unicode, which comes with many recent Windows computers, though it's missing a few symbols, can't do the accents right, and is really really ugly.

  These web-pages will use the fonts in the above order of preference (i.e., if you have both Gentium and Doulos installed, you'll see Gentium).

  Actually, you should be able to get these pages to work with any Unicode font at all that has coverage of the IPA range of characters, though you might need some trickery to set it as your browser's default font.

  For a more complete list of possible fonts and more in-depth explanations, you can go to John Wells' page on IPA and Unicode.

• a fairly recent browser

  specifically, a browser that can handle Cascading Style Sheets. (This is so the browser can tell which stretches are regular text and which stretches should use the phonetics font.)

  • Mozilla will work fine.
  • A stripped-down version of Mozilla, such as Firefox, will work fine.
  • Versions of Mozilla calling themselves Netscape 7 should do fine.
  • I imagine recent versions of Opera will do fine.
  • Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer supports Cascading Style Sheets, at least from version 6 on, but like most Microsoft claims to support international standards, they exaggerate a lot -- still, Internet Explorer 6 should mostly work.

  If you simply can't get any recent browser, you should still be able to see the pages fairly well if you set your ancient browser's default font to one of those listed above (but not Arial, please -- that's too hideous to think about).

• Javascript enabled

  In order for most of the practice exercises to work, you'll need to have Javascript turned on in your browser. You may have turned Javascript off to avoid pop-up ads and other annoyances. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, chances are good that you didn't it off and you're ready to go.) Apart from the exercises, no other part of this web-site needs Javascript.

Quick warning about syllabic [n]:

After you've set up your font as described above, compare the following two symbols:

If they look different, you're done. Go learn phonetics. If they look the same, then you're unfortunately the victim of yet another piece of Microsoft incompetence. If you're using Windows XP, installing Service Pack 1 has been known to solve the problem. Otherwise, you're just going to have to use your imagination and pretend that every time you see [ƞ] (but not [ŋ]!) you're really seeing an [n] with a little vertical line under it, just like the little vertical line under the following: [m̩], [ɹ̩], [z̩]. I'll warn you again when the time come. Now go learn phonetics.

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