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I want a way to be able to write the pronunciation of different words that are in different languages, does anyone have a suggestion for how to do this?

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  • Welcome to Language Learning Stack Exchange! IPA can be useful, but I find your question a bit confusing. The title suggests that it is about understanding IPA (i.e. you want to read and understand something that is already transcribed in IPA), while the question body suggests that you want to learn how to transcribe what you hear into IPA. Could you please edit your question to remove the ambiguity? – Tsundoku♦ Feb 23 '18 at 11:35
  • @ChristopheStrobbe I did it, my apologies for the incomprehensible question) – yasiren Feb 23 '18 at 12:16
  • Thanks. Do the answers to How can I learn IPA? answer your question, or are you looking for something else? – Tsundoku♦ Feb 23 '18 at 14:18
  • @ChristopheStrobbe it kinda does. I was hoping to find something where I can enter the words and it will give me the IPA. I need something like this for many languages by the way. probably such a thing doesn't even exist. – yasiren Feb 23 '18 at 16:47
  • If you are looking for a tool that does this, please add this to your question. I would also suggest adding how this is relevant to learning or teaching, otherwise it sounds like a pure linguistics question. – Tsundoku♦ Feb 23 '18 at 17:35
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If you are looking for a tool that converts text into API, the open source speech synthesizer eSpeak does this for a number of languages. Of course, some languages are better supported than English. You will need to use eSpeak on the command line. For example, if your version of eSpeak is installed on MS Windows in C:\Program Files\eSpeak, the program you can access from the command line is in C:\Program Files\eSpeak\command_line (the file 'espeak.exe'). To use this, you will either need to add that folder to your path (see the system variables) or call this exe file directly.

The syntax for the command follows a pattern like this:

espeak -v en --ipa --phonout="D:\_eSpeak-output.txt" wordToBeSpoken

In this example,

  • -v en sets the voice, namely 'en' for English (see the supported languages in the documentation);
  • --ipa tells eSpeak to output IPA;
  • --phonout="D:\_eSpeak-output.txt" tells output where to write the output, in this case a file named '_eSpeak-output.txt' on the D-drive (the file location needs to be in a folder where programs can write without administrator permission);
  • wordToBeSpoken obviously needs to be replace with the word that you want to convert into IPA.

For other command line options, see the command line options in the documentation.

If this is too complicated, you can also try EasyPronunciation.com, which has some online tools for converting text into IPA.

If you want a tool that you can install on Windows PCs, you can try IPANow by PhoneticSoft. This tool supports Latin, Italian, German and French.

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For IPA for English text, there is also online IPA transcription tool https://tophonetics.com/ (formerly Lingorado.com, and also available on smarttphone) which generates IPA transcripts in multiple formats. Based on open-source Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary which is non-IPA, but fully ASCII (which has its own benefits).

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