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Comment by piva00 | Hacker News Reader

In parts of Europe it's quite common (at least in Sweden and Norway I know it's true) to learn the IPA so you can make sense of the alphabet and its phonemes, no need to be a language nerd to have a passing knowledge of IPA.

I recommend you studying it a little, it's really not that hard, just looks weird.

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Can confirm. Also learned it in school in Germany, although I forgot most of it, because I almost never use it. For most things, forvo [0] works good enough.

[0] https://forvo.com/search/Yggdrasil/

Know of any good resources to learn it?

-noob language nerd

I like the IPA Chart website [0] which lists the phonemes and has examples of each when clicked. To understand a pronunciation (such as /ɪg.drə.sɪl/ for Yggdrasil), I'll match up the symbols to the chart and piece it together from the sample sounds.

Sidenote: I had a bit of trouble locating an IPA transcription for Yggdrasil. The pronunciation guide in the Wikipedia article for Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X is not IPA, it's using English pronunciation rules to try to emulate the correct pronunciation. The pronunciation in dictionaries (at least Merriam Webster) is also not quite IPA, though it is close. I came up with this pronunciation by merging those sources. I is probably correct, as I found a matching transcription in an old version of the Yggdrasil Wikipedia article which was removed for being original research.

[0] https://www.ipachart.com/

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