A Course in Phonetics

A stunning triumph! Ladefoged's approach is both perfectly intuitive and intriguingly nontraditional, starting with simplified versions of all the concepts in an English context for English speakers in the first half of the book, and then expanding them each in the second half in a comparative way that builds on what we've learned. Super easy to read, with demonstrations, an amazing wealth of material on the CD, and pages and pages of exercise that fly the flag for the old-school idea that a phonetician should actually be able to produce and hear as many sounds as possible rather than just understand them in the abstract, this book is probably THE phonetics text I'd recommend to novices or anyone bad at producing a voiced pharyngeal show more fricative (not that I'm some big authority in these matters), and the only criticism I can level against it is that it didn't manage to make the parts of phonetics I already find dreary (e.g. pitch, with the overtechnical silliness of the "ToBI" method) palatable. Now I'm off to practice my formants. Farewell! Agluck agluck! show less

Ha ha, twice in a year, and I still think it's indispensable (twice in a year!), and I still like everything about it except pitch and ToBI, and I'm still gonna end my review with . . . agluck agluck!