Logic of English gives a great foundation to the IPA, it might just be a matter of adding the symbols in where desired.
"Phonemic Awareness" is a regular section of the lesson plans - how a sound is made, hearing the difference between sounds, and the manual includes notes on various accents.
The Spelling Journal is sorted by sound, giving all the different spelling options in one place, and includes notes on related spelling rules under the phonograms. (I've added additional notes in mine.)
Egan-friendly aspects of LOE:
-When reciting spelling rules, she encourages students to use funny voices, giving variety and humor.
-Her Rhythm of Handwriting method, incorporated into the manuals, includes verbal cues and she gives ideas for a variety of somatic experiences.
-Some of the reading practices involve riddles and clues to puzzles.
-She includes backstories on how pronunciations and spellings have changed over time, both for individual words and general trends.
That's just off the top of my head... I've used a range of her materials and would be happy to discuss them more in-depth if needed!
Yes, all of this! I was kind of surprised when lesson 1 of teaching a kid to read involved me feeling my voice box to appreciate voiced vs unvoiced sounds for, umm, the literal first time in my life, and I get the feeling the author would have loved to go even deeper into all of that if not for the fact that it's a hard sell. Also the phonogram songs! "Pouting poultry should tour the country, teaching everybody the sounds of ou" still gets repeated here 4+ years later. "Uncle's ugly underwear" vs "put the butcher in the pudding" was incredibly helpful for appreciating the difference between the short and broad sounds of u. And my kids loved the backstories. Found memories of explaining the scribal O to a 3 year old, who absolutely didn't completely understand the explanation but did understand that there was an explanation and that his questions were being taken seriously.
We did all of LoE Foundations, took a break, and have since completed all the units in level B of essentials and started level C (though we've been skipping grammar because we also use MCT). The only change we've made so far is to use spaced repetition via anki for phonograms and spelling rules. But it just occurred to me that we could go through the spelling journal and write the IPA symbol for the sound on each page! LoE names sounds by short, long, and broad for the single letter vowels but otherwise just identifies sounds according to frequency (which isn't as awkward as it sounds since the aforementioned songs make it easy to memorize the sounds of each phonogram in order of descending frequency). Outside of the spelling journal, LoE doesn't do a ton of emphasizing that, say, the broad sound of u is the same as the second most common sound of oo and the short sound of o is the broad sound of a. On the one hand I feel like introducing one symbol that stands in for each sound earlier would have been helpful, on the other I feel like the fact that some IPA symbols are identical to symbols that are also used for English phonograms is tricky and I wouldn't have wanted to try it earlier, especially for my kid who may be dyslexic.
And speaking of that kid, I don't know if cursive could be said to fit into Egan in any way, but at 9 she still flips her numbers occasionally and has literally never reversed a letter in her life because she started writing cursive when she started learning to read and cursive just doesn't afford writing letters backwards. I have Catholic school cursive baggage so I was really hesitant to do cursive first, but the explanation that kids often hate cursive not because cursive is awful but because they are forced to switch to learning it as soon as they become proficient in printing resonated with me and I'm really glad we went for it.
I've started reading Fluent Forever and it's fantastically written and I love the fact that it has grounding in cognitive science and practical, hands-on application. As I've been reading I've been thinking about testing out the theories by trying to jump back on the horse and learn Cantonese again.
But I'm actually at the stage before that: learning the IPA. I'm not exactly sure how to progress because I don't know how much of the IPA to learn. You see, as an English teacher to students who are native speakers of Chinese, it makes sense to at least know enough of the IPA to be able to represent the 44 sounds of English, plus a few more for dipthongs and common North American pronunciation. I've got a decent chunk of that down. If I wanted to know the IPA for Cantonese there's a whole other set of things to learn, not least the symbols for tones. To learn everything seems like it wouldn't be worth it because I don't have enough real-language referents to match them to. It could make most sense to learn the IPA for your target language, and add new sounds as you are introduced to foreign words or new languages.
That brings me to the question of what to do with the existing transcription systems for Cantonese and Mandarin. I've learned pinyin well enough that I can read Mandarin Chinese terms with decent pronunciation and the Cantonese equivalents Jyutping and the Yale system are certainly helpful and I can parse them better than IPA. The issue isn't only learning IPA for Cantonese, it's that language learning materials generally don't use IPA. At least for English-speaking learners they tend to use these established transcription systems and so IPA only helps as a third contact point. It's nice but not essential.
When I bring up IPA to other language teachers, the most common response that I get is that it's simply ANOTHER coding system you need to learn and that it's confusing to teach two at the same time.
So where does that leave me? I'll definitely learn the English-relevant IPA sounds (I already know the vowels) and then see how much additional outlay Cantonese requires. I'm going to be making some major changes to our phonics curriculum next year and I might try introducing it as a cipher and then setting it alongside newly-introduced sounds. One immediate use for me would be illustrating that different letters can make the same sound and the same letter can make different sounds.
Yeah! I was going to point you to the couple Wikipedia pages on this (Google "IPA Cantonese" and you'll see 'em), but then I realized that Gabriel Wyner actually made an Anki deck for this, and a bunch of videos:
He also made a vocabulary trainer, which I think you'll see there. They're each a bit of money, but for something as powerful as nigh-perfect punctuation, they're cheap!
>> "When I bring up IPA to other language teachers, the most common response that I get is that it's simply ANOTHER coding system you need to learn and that it's confusing to teach two at the same time."
Y'know, if the Jyutping and the Yale system really are able to communicate the specifics of how Cantonese sounds (much better than the Latin alphabet communicates English), then the IPA won't offer much! I suppose the one thing it would do is help you tie into the world of online "how do I pronounce this" videos made by linguists... but maybe there's already good stuff with that for Cantonese. Let us know what you find!
Jyutping or Yale basically offer what IPA does one written code for one sound. The codes can be somewhat arbitrary as long as you can match them in your head. The key (because they use mostly English letters) is to not let the English pronunciations of the symbols interfere with the way the Cantonese should sound - English graphemes don't map perfectly. That said, it's mostly a matter of learning the code and getting enough experience to reproduce the sounds.
What excites me most about Wyner's method is the minimal pair practice. That is promises to be SO helpful when dealing with tonal differences.
I'm on board with the idea of IPA and my 9 year old and 7 year old have been enjoying approaching it as a cipher. That said, they've both been fluently reading chapter book level text for four years at this point, and have progressed in spelling a ton in the last few years. I don't think I would have been comfortable introducing them to IPA much before this point.
While I appreciate the differences (notably that IPA is useful beyond the process of learning to read), the idea reminds me of the Initial Teaching Alphabet, and it doesn't seem like most people feel like that turned out particularly well. The unsurprising problem, it seems, was a failure to follow up with explicit teaching of the standard alphabet. In a homeschooling context it might be easier to make sure that explicit instruction eventually happens. I do wonder what the impact on spelling in the standard alphabet might be; as most people seem to spell by comparing to a mental image. But a bigger challenge from my perspective is that it would make it harder to leverage the drive for autonomy as a powerful force for learning to read.
We used Logic of English Foundations starting the literal day after my then 4.5 year old asked me to teach her to read. I knew that I needed to be ready when she was, because if I said no when she asked I was quite sure she would later say no when I asked. We did over an hour of Logic of English a day (playfully! with the mini trampoline and skateboard and her enthusiastic consent!) all summer while the playgrounds were closed. At the beginning she recognized no letter but O, 4 months later she was (slowly and painstakingly) reading Zoey and Sassafras aloud to me to her great delight, and a couple months after that reading chapter books was effortless.
This came as a shock to me, because I had been trying to manage her expectations since I had been told this process took years. Of course some kids pick up reading effortlessly (the younger one became a fluent reader at the same time just by being in the room), but my older one sounded out the word "firefly" literally every single time it appeared in the LoE reader thusly entitled and otherwise also required more than the 1-4 exposures for orthographic mapping I've seen quoted as average. I think that for her the combination of direct explicit instruction that started right when she experienced a drive to understand the written word all around her and gain the independence of reading was a powerful combination, and I never would have been able to sell her on learning IPA first even if it might have in some sense have been "easier."
>> "I do wonder what the impact on spelling in the standard alphabet might be; as most people seem to spell by comparing to a mental image. But a bigger challenge from my perspective is that it would make it harder to leverage the drive for autonomy as a powerful force for learning to read."
BOTH of those are wise counsel! I think that I was inspired by (1) how kids learn modern Hebrew with vowels (which are later taken away) and (2) the clever "Pronouncing Orthography" system from the 1800s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronouncing_Orthography). I'm realizing now, though, that both of those merely added on some squiggles to the normal letters to aid pronunciation; they didn't change the spelling as both the IPA and the Initial Teaching Alphabet system you mentioned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet) do. I'm now warier of using the IPA to help teach spelling -- thanks! I'll edit the post to reflect that.
Back when Cadmus (so they say) invented the Greek alphabet, he got something right: one letter = one sound (mostly). There's an important difference between long and short 'o' so we make two separate letters for them!
My problem with pronunciation is that it sounds so different inside my head than outside: I want to say 'th' as in 'the', I imitate as best as I can someone else pronouncing it, and it sounds right to me but comes out as 'd' which I notice if I record myself and play it back. If someone knows how to make me hear live what my voice sounds like to others, I'm excited to know how.
Ok, hear me out on this. I'm making a connection. :) And it includes a throwback to the 44th in the Eagan Pattern Language: Geeky Songs.
We were learning about Genghis Khan, and we started talking about how Chengiss is (slowly?) becoming a more accepted transliteration. Lots of googling and chatgpt-ing followed to understand this fascinating linguistic story behind. And then...
We found the most amazing song by the Mongolian heavy metal band the HU, "The Great Chingiss Khan."
If you had told me that I'd be listening to songs performed in Mongolian or using heavy metal to understand not only history but proper pronunciation, well, to be honest, I'd believe you, but I NEVER would have imagined its impact on what was intended as a pretty straightforward world history lesson.
Logic of English gives a great foundation to the IPA, it might just be a matter of adding the symbols in where desired.
"Phonemic Awareness" is a regular section of the lesson plans - how a sound is made, hearing the difference between sounds, and the manual includes notes on various accents.
The Spelling Journal is sorted by sound, giving all the different spelling options in one place, and includes notes on related spelling rules under the phonograms. (I've added additional notes in mine.)
Egan-friendly aspects of LOE:
-When reciting spelling rules, she encourages students to use funny voices, giving variety and humor.
-Her Rhythm of Handwriting method, incorporated into the manuals, includes verbal cues and she gives ideas for a variety of somatic experiences.
-Some of the reading practices involve riddles and clues to puzzles.
-She includes backstories on how pronunciations and spellings have changed over time, both for individual words and general trends.
That's just off the top of my head... I've used a range of her materials and would be happy to discuss them more in-depth if needed!
Yes, all of this! I was kind of surprised when lesson 1 of teaching a kid to read involved me feeling my voice box to appreciate voiced vs unvoiced sounds for, umm, the literal first time in my life, and I get the feeling the author would have loved to go even deeper into all of that if not for the fact that it's a hard sell. Also the phonogram songs! "Pouting poultry should tour the country, teaching everybody the sounds of ou" still gets repeated here 4+ years later. "Uncle's ugly underwear" vs "put the butcher in the pudding" was incredibly helpful for appreciating the difference between the short and broad sounds of u. And my kids loved the backstories. Found memories of explaining the scribal O to a 3 year old, who absolutely didn't completely understand the explanation but did understand that there was an explanation and that his questions were being taken seriously.
We did all of LoE Foundations, took a break, and have since completed all the units in level B of essentials and started level C (though we've been skipping grammar because we also use MCT). The only change we've made so far is to use spaced repetition via anki for phonograms and spelling rules. But it just occurred to me that we could go through the spelling journal and write the IPA symbol for the sound on each page! LoE names sounds by short, long, and broad for the single letter vowels but otherwise just identifies sounds according to frequency (which isn't as awkward as it sounds since the aforementioned songs make it easy to memorize the sounds of each phonogram in order of descending frequency). Outside of the spelling journal, LoE doesn't do a ton of emphasizing that, say, the broad sound of u is the same as the second most common sound of oo and the short sound of o is the broad sound of a. On the one hand I feel like introducing one symbol that stands in for each sound earlier would have been helpful, on the other I feel like the fact that some IPA symbols are identical to symbols that are also used for English phonograms is tricky and I wouldn't have wanted to try it earlier, especially for my kid who may be dyslexic.
And speaking of that kid, I don't know if cursive could be said to fit into Egan in any way, but at 9 she still flips her numbers occasionally and has literally never reversed a letter in her life because she started writing cursive when she started learning to read and cursive just doesn't afford writing letters backwards. I have Catholic school cursive baggage so I was really hesitant to do cursive first, but the explanation that kids often hate cursive not because cursive is awful but because they are forced to switch to learning it as soon as they become proficient in printing resonated with me and I'm really glad we went for it.
Yes, please!
I've started reading Fluent Forever and it's fantastically written and I love the fact that it has grounding in cognitive science and practical, hands-on application. As I've been reading I've been thinking about testing out the theories by trying to jump back on the horse and learn Cantonese again.
But I'm actually at the stage before that: learning the IPA. I'm not exactly sure how to progress because I don't know how much of the IPA to learn. You see, as an English teacher to students who are native speakers of Chinese, it makes sense to at least know enough of the IPA to be able to represent the 44 sounds of English, plus a few more for dipthongs and common North American pronunciation. I've got a decent chunk of that down. If I wanted to know the IPA for Cantonese there's a whole other set of things to learn, not least the symbols for tones. To learn everything seems like it wouldn't be worth it because I don't have enough real-language referents to match them to. It could make most sense to learn the IPA for your target language, and add new sounds as you are introduced to foreign words or new languages.
That brings me to the question of what to do with the existing transcription systems for Cantonese and Mandarin. I've learned pinyin well enough that I can read Mandarin Chinese terms with decent pronunciation and the Cantonese equivalents Jyutping and the Yale system are certainly helpful and I can parse them better than IPA. The issue isn't only learning IPA for Cantonese, it's that language learning materials generally don't use IPA. At least for English-speaking learners they tend to use these established transcription systems and so IPA only helps as a third contact point. It's nice but not essential.
When I bring up IPA to other language teachers, the most common response that I get is that it's simply ANOTHER coding system you need to learn and that it's confusing to teach two at the same time.
So where does that leave me? I'll definitely learn the English-relevant IPA sounds (I already know the vowels) and then see how much additional outlay Cantonese requires. I'm going to be making some major changes to our phonics curriculum next year and I might try introducing it as a cipher and then setting it alongside newly-introduced sounds. One immediate use for me would be illustrating that different letters can make the same sound and the same letter can make different sounds.
Yeah! I was going to point you to the couple Wikipedia pages on this (Google "IPA Cantonese" and you'll see 'em), but then I realized that Gabriel Wyner actually made an Anki deck for this, and a bunch of videos:
https://fluent-forever.com/product/english-chinesecantonese/
He also made a vocabulary trainer, which I think you'll see there. They're each a bit of money, but for something as powerful as nigh-perfect punctuation, they're cheap!
I'm all over the Canto anki deck... as soon as I work through coral anatomy.
>> "When I bring up IPA to other language teachers, the most common response that I get is that it's simply ANOTHER coding system you need to learn and that it's confusing to teach two at the same time."
Y'know, if the Jyutping and the Yale system really are able to communicate the specifics of how Cantonese sounds (much better than the Latin alphabet communicates English), then the IPA won't offer much! I suppose the one thing it would do is help you tie into the world of online "how do I pronounce this" videos made by linguists... but maybe there's already good stuff with that for Cantonese. Let us know what you find!
Jyutping or Yale basically offer what IPA does one written code for one sound. The codes can be somewhat arbitrary as long as you can match them in your head. The key (because they use mostly English letters) is to not let the English pronunciations of the symbols interfere with the way the Cantonese should sound - English graphemes don't map perfectly. That said, it's mostly a matter of learning the code and getting enough experience to reproduce the sounds.
What excites me most about Wyner's method is the minimal pair practice. That is promises to be SO helpful when dealing with tonal differences.
I'm on board with the idea of IPA and my 9 year old and 7 year old have been enjoying approaching it as a cipher. That said, they've both been fluently reading chapter book level text for four years at this point, and have progressed in spelling a ton in the last few years. I don't think I would have been comfortable introducing them to IPA much before this point.
While I appreciate the differences (notably that IPA is useful beyond the process of learning to read), the idea reminds me of the Initial Teaching Alphabet, and it doesn't seem like most people feel like that turned out particularly well. The unsurprising problem, it seems, was a failure to follow up with explicit teaching of the standard alphabet. In a homeschooling context it might be easier to make sure that explicit instruction eventually happens. I do wonder what the impact on spelling in the standard alphabet might be; as most people seem to spell by comparing to a mental image. But a bigger challenge from my perspective is that it would make it harder to leverage the drive for autonomy as a powerful force for learning to read.
We used Logic of English Foundations starting the literal day after my then 4.5 year old asked me to teach her to read. I knew that I needed to be ready when she was, because if I said no when she asked I was quite sure she would later say no when I asked. We did over an hour of Logic of English a day (playfully! with the mini trampoline and skateboard and her enthusiastic consent!) all summer while the playgrounds were closed. At the beginning she recognized no letter but O, 4 months later she was (slowly and painstakingly) reading Zoey and Sassafras aloud to me to her great delight, and a couple months after that reading chapter books was effortless.
This came as a shock to me, because I had been trying to manage her expectations since I had been told this process took years. Of course some kids pick up reading effortlessly (the younger one became a fluent reader at the same time just by being in the room), but my older one sounded out the word "firefly" literally every single time it appeared in the LoE reader thusly entitled and otherwise also required more than the 1-4 exposures for orthographic mapping I've seen quoted as average. I think that for her the combination of direct explicit instruction that started right when she experienced a drive to understand the written word all around her and gain the independence of reading was a powerful combination, and I never would have been able to sell her on learning IPA first even if it might have in some sense have been "easier."
>> "I do wonder what the impact on spelling in the standard alphabet might be; as most people seem to spell by comparing to a mental image. But a bigger challenge from my perspective is that it would make it harder to leverage the drive for autonomy as a powerful force for learning to read."
BOTH of those are wise counsel! I think that I was inspired by (1) how kids learn modern Hebrew with vowels (which are later taken away) and (2) the clever "Pronouncing Orthography" system from the 1800s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronouncing_Orthography). I'm realizing now, though, that both of those merely added on some squiggles to the normal letters to aid pronunciation; they didn't change the spelling as both the IPA and the Initial Teaching Alphabet system you mentioned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet) do. I'm now warier of using the IPA to help teach spelling -- thanks! I'll edit the post to reflect that.
Back when Cadmus (so they say) invented the Greek alphabet, he got something right: one letter = one sound (mostly). There's an important difference between long and short 'o' so we make two separate letters for them!
My problem with pronunciation is that it sounds so different inside my head than outside: I want to say 'th' as in 'the', I imitate as best as I can someone else pronouncing it, and it sounds right to me but comes out as 'd' which I notice if I record myself and play it back. If someone knows how to make me hear live what my voice sounds like to others, I'm excited to know how.
So is the purpose of Eganizing education to create a culture that produces learning freaks (in the best sense of that word)?
Ok, hear me out on this. I'm making a connection. :) And it includes a throwback to the 44th in the Eagan Pattern Language: Geeky Songs.
We were learning about Genghis Khan, and we started talking about how Chengiss is (slowly?) becoming a more accepted transliteration. Lots of googling and chatgpt-ing followed to understand this fascinating linguistic story behind. And then...
We found the most amazing song by the Mongolian heavy metal band the HU, "The Great Chingiss Khan."
If you had told me that I'd be listening to songs performed in Mongolian or using heavy metal to understand not only history but proper pronunciation, well, to be honest, I'd believe you, but I NEVER would have imagined its impact on what was intended as a pretty straightforward world history lesson.
Check it out for yourself: https://youtu.be/R1ybVWXwsVk
Oh, and don't sleep on heavy metal as its own sub-category of geeky history songs. Just maybe consider turning on the captions. ;)