TRANSCRIBING ENGLISH

Many of you holding this book may not need to be convinced of the importance and usefulness of phonemic transcription in language learning. If you happen to be among the happy uninitiated or are just reluctant to deal formally with pronunciation, I would simply say that transcription is to a language learner what musical notation is to a musician. For all its limitations, it is the best tool we have to show to the eye what is addressed to the ear alone, thereby enabling us to separate our perception of sounds from their orthographic representation.