All Things Linguistic

Today was my first tutorial session (McGill calls them “conferences” - I’m not sure why) with my intro ling students. They’re learning the IPA, so in addition to doing some standard IPA-practising exercises, we also played IPA Bingo. It’s pretty easy to set up, and a good practise.

Each student makes a bingo board with IPA symbols (as shown in the picture) and then the caller (me) says the descriptions, like “voiced labiodental fricative”, so the students have to be able to understand them in order to cross off a box. You could also do the inverse, where the boards have descriptions and the caller writes symbols, or with either board you could instead have the caller produce the sound. I told my students that they had to have at least 3 symbols that aren’t part of the standard Roman alphabet, because those are the ones that people tend to need the most practise with. 

Memorizing (most) of the IPA is generally a pretty unavoidable part of beginning linguistics. I’ve heard of people using flashcards and blank IPA charts: anyone else have any more ideas?