How to remember the IPA consonant chart
Here are some ways of remembering what all the English consonants are in the International Phonetic Alphabet. (Looking for how to remember vowels?)
The basics: a clickable IPA chart, an interactive cross-section of the human vocal tract, and the IPA consonants for English in a chart:
I strongly recommend learning the IPA symbols at the same time as you learn their position on the charts. The charts are designed like that for a reason and they’ll help you remember which sounds are similar to each other and where they’re pronounced in the mouth. Why? Because the chart is a really stylized representation of where in the mouth the sounds are pronounced, as you can see in the rough diagram below. (The vowel chart is similar but a bit less stylized.)
The point is that the leftmost columns of the consonant chart are at the front of the mouth (the lips), and then as the columns go rightward, the sounds go toward the back of the mouth and down into the throat. The rows from top to bottom, very broadly speaking, go in order from the most amount of mouth closure to the least amount of mouth closure.*
*Very broadly speaking, especially because different courses sometimes rearrange the rows around the middle of the chart. This is a mnemonic, not an absolute rule.
A great way to practise the IPA symbols with the chart is to get a blank diagram and practise writing the symbols in, preferably with keywords for the ones that don’t look like their intuitive English sounds so that you remember what they sound like. (The consonant chart is easier than the vowel chart, because some of the consonants have the sound you’d expect from English, while virtually none of the vowel symbols correspond to their intuitive English sounds haha just kidding there’s no such thing as an intuitive English vowel sound-letter correspondence, English vowels are completely messed up.)
Here is an IPA consonant chart for English with keywords for the symbols that don’t have their typical English sounds:
I’ve capitalized the “s” in “casual” to emphasize that the relevant sound is in the middle of the word, since English words that begin with ʒ are very rare. I’ve also used “Johan” as the keyword for /j/ as a mnemonic that the “j” is pronounced like in German, i.e. like the “y” in “yellow”. Feel free to use “yellow” as a keyword instead, if you’d rather have English words for all of them. I’ve put /w/ in parentheses as a reminder that it goes in TWO columns, both bilabial and velar, since it is pronounced with constriction at both the lips and the velum. “Church” and “judge” are bonus keywords because they have their relevant sounds twice.
Here is an IPA consonant chart with keywords for all the symbols, even those that do have their typical English sounds, if you prefer it. The keywords aren’t particularly meaningful but I tried to pick common words that had the sound at both the beginning and end, where feasible.
Here is an IPA consonant chart with the names that are commonly used for the special symbols that aren’t referred to by their common English letter names, for example if spelling a transcription out loud:
Note that /ɹ/ looks like a special symbol but doesn’t have a particular name in common use. If necessary, you could use “upside down r” or perhaps “turned r”. Also note that “eth” as a name is itself pronounced with a voiced “th”.
Here is a blank IPA consonant chart with the non-English sounds greyed out, so you can practise filling in all the white boxes:
Here is the same blank IPA consonant chart but with the names of all the columns removed, for advanced practice:
For the most advanced-level practice, draw out the IPA charts including headers with no clues at all, on a blank sheet of paper or whiteboard. Say the sounds out loud as you go. And then move on to vowels!
snowghoul
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton