Essence

1. Let's just try it first, before talking about it.
   ⇐ Look at the Instrument, top row. Go from left to right.
   Here is a head, like any head, like yours. There is a hole, with air quietly in and out.

2. The head drawings show what happens.
   On the left head, nothing is happening: silence.
   I write that with [/-].

3. In the middle: something is happening. What? Hold your throat high and deep and say [sosososo], do you feel it? That vibration? That is Voice.

   Teacher note: when their eyes get bright, they got it.

   Teacher does: finger on the drawing. Teacher says: This shows what happens.
   Teacher does: finger on [+/].
   Teacher says: This is what I write to mean Voice. So [/-] means No Voice, Voiceless.

   I write VOICE as [+/]. See how everything is voiced on this page? (On the back side some things are UNVOICED with [/-].)

4. On the right: something else is happening. Teacher says: [h]
   Teacher note: not [hɑ] not [hə] just [h].
   This is just an out-breath, but loud, not quiet. See how the drawing shows it? Air in chaos there?
   Teacher does: finger on the drawing.
   Teacher says: This shows what happens in your head.
   Teacher does: finger on the letter h. Teacher says: This is how we write it.
   Teacher note: maybe add that its name is aitch.

5. Teacher says: These are square brackets. Brackets mean "trust". With brackets you get actual sounds. Brackets mark Phonetic Transcription meaning 1 sound, 1 letter: you can write what you hear, say what you read, and a native speaker will agree you said it right."

   Out in the wild text without brackets cannot be trusted, you have to guess how to say them, and everyone normally guesses wrong. With brackets anyone who knows how to read it also knows how to say it.

   Brackets indicate that the writer is a scientist of language who declares that this is an accurate report of actual pronunciation. Using brackets means you are an expert, honestly reporting your well-trained ears.

   It means that you know, while others merely guess. Always use [ ]'s to write pronunciations.

   Omitting them will encourage the ignorant to think you are even more ignorant than they. Don't leave them out.

   Bracket the whole word or sentence or line -- not every letter separately.
6. [ɑ]

   Teacher says: Skip one row.
   Teacher does: Point to the [ɑ] row drawings, covering up the actual vowel letters to not give away the answer.
   Teacher says: What does this ([+/]) say? Voiced. You know that already.
   Teacher says: What does this (big down arrow) say? "Open mouth". It has a name: "open"

   Teacher says: "I will do it. Look at my mouth now."
   Teacher does: [mouth wide open, no sound], count to 3.
   Teacher says: "Oh! I made a mistake! I forgot the [+/]! I didn't make the voice sound. Let me do it again."
   Teacher does: [mouth wide open, no sound], count to 2, then a short but plenty loud [ɑ].
   Teacher says: One is not enough, the drawings say both so I have to do both.

   Teacher says: Everybody! Can you do it by the drawings? Try it. (waits) What did you do? [ɑ]
   Did I teach you or did you follow the drawings?
   Teacher note: Practice until they can say, The Drawings!

   The drawings show what we do. In the brackets is how we write it. [ɑ]. Now you know [ɑ].

7. Now, again: [h] then [ɑ]: [hɑ]. Twice: [h ɑ h ɑ], then [hɑhɑ].

8. Four symbols, one sound each; together they mean something: a laugh.

9. That is the whole idea:
   • actions in the mouth (phonetic reality combining physical features);
   • symbols to identify them (symbolization);
   • sequence of symbols, sequence of sounds (segmentality, sequencing),
   • meaning (sounds give words, words give meaning).

This is the essence of how to read.

Yes, it's that easy.

Introduction

Now you know the essence. The rest is just more a few more sounds, re-using features from these drawings, each with their different symbols; then you can read and write anything phonetically.

What IPA is

What is the International Phonetic Alphabet? The idea of the IPA is to write all distinctive sounds of all languages.

IPA defines phonetic symbols by the locations and actions which physically produce the different sounds of language in the human mouth. This is called "articulatory phonetics", and its features include gestures, locations, and actions. In anyone's mouth they sound identifiably similar to everyone: each sound from any mouth can be heard as the same as that sound from any other mouth. That's why humans can share spoken language.

In this way, IPA is truth: basic, foundational.

India says, Satyam Eva Jayate: Truth Always Wins.

We will try to prove it.

What IPA First makes possible

IPA First accelerates or enables many paths.

If IPA is known there can be no such thing as an unwritten language; write it with IPA; share it; now it is written.

If IPA is taught then correct learning theory is followed and learning is accelerated. Teaching should build on or extend existing knowledge. The existing knowledge is every student's knowledge of the sounds of their own language, in which they are experts. The extension that gets built is that student learns easy-to-draw labels for those existing sound categories. The learning is nearly trivial. Draw a few smiley faces; now the student is already capable of drawing many letter shapes (O, U, i...). The new work is to learn a few fun sounds, since no language has all the sounds of all languages. Some differences are re-learned, what as babies they learned to ignore, though other languages rely on them. A practical subset might include one's own language's sounds plus those additional sounds that adjacent languages might use; adjacent in geography or history or even interest. But it's fun to learn the whole set: Why NOT learn the voiced bilabial trill, [ʙ], or various click sounds? It's fun to learn, to be able, or at least to try, to do everything that humans can do!

If IPA is learned first, every language can quickly be learned. You already know the different sounds that occur in it; they are sounds you know from the IPA. The sounds of each language are a subset of IPA sounds.

Because IPA includes English (lower-case) letters, once you know IPA you can read most English street signs, imperfectly but usefully. When you recognize the sign (even a bad guess can be recognized on the sign), you have arrived.

IPA is the foundation. Every script and every word in every language is easily defined using, written in IPA. Modern dictionaries use IPA for the pronunciations of words. To learn any script, learn IPA first, then see how the script is defined in IPA: easy! For example, see Devanagari.

IPA First solves literacy, even for those with little time in school and little technology. A phonetic alphabet is learnable, phonetically accurate, and covers the world.

An innovation: cartoons

IPA is old. The innovation here is simply to relabel these charts of symbols with cartoons.

Cartoon pictures are simplified, mechanical, line drawings. They show the distinctive features of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Thus we remove the requirements of academic vocabulary (and entrance) such as "fricative", "velar", etc. We loosen the requirement of school-based learning. Anyone, from prisoners to isolates to the urban poor, can self-study this content, learn it with minimal support, or learn it on-line. A little explanation, few classes, can put the student on the path to figuring out the basics themselves.

How much faster can students in school learn, supported by a solid foundation? To know how to pronounce something is to know it actually, and now you can move on. IPA accelerates learning.

Phonetic drawings make the IPA letters' phonetic features clear to nearly anyone, including any illiterate or semi-literate schoolchild or adult. (Not if they are blind, and not if they cannot yet understand cartoons, say age 3 or 4.) Drawings may make a phonetic alphabet self-decodable even when picked up from a dispenser on the road. They can certainly be strange-looking before you take them seriously and actually use them. But then, they turn out to be excellent study aids for students and teaching aids for in-person teachers. They clearly, unambiguously, show head, anatomy, voice, gesture, action, and location; that is, how the sounds are made and therefore what the sounds really are. (And TomVeatch.com/read has apps to listen/learn/test yourself for homework or in class.)

The instrument was designed to use these drawings under two constraints:

• To be universally accessible. To be readable in any language, it can have no language on it: only head and mouth and arrows, the simplest -- but accurate -- cartoon drawings of movements, shapes and positions.

• To be universally deliverable. One sheet of paper, two sided, drawn and scaled so that necessary details survive a black and white copy machine.

How it spreads

My job is to push my innovation, which brings phonetic knowledge to anyone aged 3 - 99, as far as it may go. Here is my argument:

One who has learned can also teach. With encapsulation of the teaching process, encouragement to the students, and some quality control, this system can become truly viral through social transmission, with some doubling rate R_0 > 1. If viral then everyone, worldwide, will soon have the chance to learn to read and write their own language, and others. IPA First could potentially solve the world illiteracy problem (745 million illiterate adults by UNESCO's 2015 count, 3000 unwritten languages) at scale.

Please join me in this project. First, learn IPA First: to accelerate your learning, so you can read and write and learn any language on a truth-based, real foundation. Second, if you know you can teach, so learn to become a teacher: learn the steps a teacher follows to teach this, which you just experienced as a student. This document describes these steps in detail. Third, if you can become a Teacher, you can become a Master Teacher, trained with this Curriculum, who can teach the next generation of Teachers and Master Teachers (in any language). Then all of you can Teach any illiterate or semi-literate person, child or adult. And if you focus on the Master-Teacher to more Master-Teachers transmission link, which is my focus, then not only will you have a few students that you know personally whom you have helped, but you will be part of the global viral chain in which your students have taught their students and their students' students, in a chain to cover the entire world.

Therefore, study this curriculum, learn to hear and speak and read and write with it, enjoy the benefits of it, but then also teach it to others, translate it to other languages, find ways to help it to be more and more viral and spread your benefax across the planet.

Curriculum Structure

This Master-Teacher Curriculum includes these parts:

Student	Teacher	Master- teacher	Part	What it holds
*	*	*	Level 0	The Essence (above): voiceless, voiced, [h], brackets, [ɑ], [h ɑ h ɑ hɑhɑ].
*	*	*	Level 1	Draw smiley faces. Review. Name vs sound. Vowels #1: [ə], length, height Consonants #1: actions before locations. 5 actions: stop, fricative, flap, approximant, lateral. Practice CV's.
*	*	*	Level 2	Vowels #2: lips and tongue oppositely forward and backward. Consonants #2: Next, 5 locations by voiceless stop bursts only. [p t ʈ č k]. The nasal proof, and nasal with all five places. Tones: 4 tone marks is a start. Practice: CVC reading and transcription (voiceless stops plus h and any vowel).
*	*	*	Level 3	Vowels #3: the full Vowel Triangle, the lax (reduced gesture) vowels [ʊ ɪ ɛ ʌ]. Consonants #3: drill known ones first, along the chart's two axes; then new ones one by one, teaching how to make it and who finds it hard. Practice CVCVC's.
*	*	*	Level 4	Review all, especially the vowel triangle and the difficult consonants. Practice and Test: read/speak and hear/transcribe.
optional	*	*	Level 5	The rest of the IPA: vowels whose rounding goes against the pattern, diacritics; APA vs IPA; tone.
optional	optional	*	Level E	English: Good and Bad Phonics (lettermap, soundmap), Guess Then Verify, the dictionary, then a word-learning lifetime.
	*	*	Teacher Training	1 Approach: to respect and love the students. 3 Motivations: Travel, Messages, Transactions. 3 Scripts. (Without the Instrument) Checklist: venue, schedule, pretest, results, instrument, notebook.
		*	Master-Teacher Training	3 Expectations: Strategy, Money/Career, Language Competence. 6 Tasks: to find, motivate, qualify, teach, and test new Teachers, and to collect results and report back to us for quality control and strategic planning.

Levels 0 to 3 cover both sides of the Instrument, the Basic and Intermediate letters, aiming to include Hindi and English. To be a successful student you need Levels 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, optionally 5 and E: perhaps 6 classes of 30 minutes, plus practice according to your desire.

Your goal is to read as comfortably as you talk.

To be a certifiable teacher you need that (0-4) plus Level 5 plus Teacher Training: a couple more classes of 30 minutes.

Your goal is to create successful Students: people who can read and write with a phonetic alphabet, one sound for each letter. With that basic literacy they go on to a lifetime of self-study.

To be a certifiable Master-Teacher you need all that (0-4, 5 and E, Teacher Training) plus Master-Teacher Training; perhaps 2 more hours.

Your goal is to create successful, effective Teachers and Master Teachers.

The February 2025 version: TeacherCurriculum-2025.php. Teachers: read Teacher Training before your first class.

Lessons

Level 0: The Essence above is Level 0.

If students have access to video visit Tom's YouTube channel and watch.
If they have access to smart phones visit TomVeatch.com/read/ and use the IPA First apps.

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Level 1: Smiley-face; review; name vs sound; V [ə] & height & length; C action

Smiley-face (Writing 1.1)

Teacher note: Without notebooks and pens, there can be no practice and little learning or success.

Teacher does: Give out notebooks and pens. Draw a smiley face for each student to have an example to copy.

Teacher says: Draw smiley faces. After one, do more. Practice making it better till you like it.

Keep students actively doing something wherever possible. A student who writes, learns.

Review: [- + h ɑ hɑhɑ]

The Three Glottal States

See the Instrument, first row of three heads:

• Everyone has a head.
  Even animals have lips over a toothy hole for air to go in and out.
  In the throat is the voicebox or larynx, holding the sound-making glottis.
  Glottis has 3 states. The glottis can be (1) quiet or not.
  If not quiet, its sound can be (2) regular (vibration) or (3) chaotic (noise).
• [/-] voiceless (quiet)
  • Here nothing is happening, this [-] means Nothing Is Happening: no voice.

• [+/] voiced
  • You felt the vibration in your throat saying [sososo]. My [+] means that.
    
  • Of all phonetic features I use [+] and [-] only for voice; the rest are drawings and arrows.
    Linguists may say voiced and unvoiced or voiceless, or write [+voice] and [-voice], or write [+vd] and [-vd].
    My convention to simplify teaching IPA first is to write [+/] for voiced, [/-] for voiceless. Simple!

  • See [+/] all over the Instrument: those are voiced.
    • A vowel is voiced and open, it has no place. No location with constriction or action. The whole mouth is open and resonates together from glottis to lips: that's a vowel. Vowels are all voiced unless whispering.
    • A consonant is a sound with a location, and an action at that location. Consonants can also be voiceless like [p, s]: look for [/-] in a few rows.
• [h]:
  • [h] is the third state of the glottis: irregular, chaotic sound, or frication.
  • Frication is chaotic noise; blow air so it makes a noise between your fingers or in your fist.
  • Frication at the glottis has a special name, "aspiration", we write [h].

Test Time! Ask:

Teacher says: What is +? (Voiced) What does it mean? (action in larynx, vibration)
Teacher says: What is -? (Voiceless) What does it mean? (nothing is happening, no vibration)
Teacher says: What is h? (breath) Where is [h]? [hɑ ɑhɑ hɑhɑ] but also together with other sounds we will learn later as in [kha gha, dha tha pha bha]

[hɑhɑhɑhɑ]: (Writing 1.2)

Teacher note: Encourage writing since action teaches best. Show "h" stroke order: vertical shoulder, arm.

To write: practice every letter. Write on the line, check stroke order and direction, and write AND say it aloud. Do easy words like "hɑhɑ" or "bɑbɑ", then harder words as able.

Write [h h h], say [h h h]. Practice until you like it.

Write [ɑ ɑ ɑ], say [ɑ ɑ ɑ]. Practice until you like it.

Already you can read and write something: [h ɑ h ɑ hɑhɑ hɑhɑhɑ].

Now or later at home,
Practice in your journal, write [ɑ ɑ ɑ ɑ ɑ h h h h h ɑ h ɑ hɑ hɑhɑ]. It's fun!
Write [ɑhɑ hɑhɑ]:

Step By Step (Writing 1.3)

• To write: say it slowly, separate the sounds, write each one left to right (Arabic: right to left).
  
• To read, see each letter, remember or look up the sound,
  
• join multiple sounds together in your mind,
  
• speak them all continuously in slow careful-sounding speech, then as fast as you are comfortable.
  

Practise outside class with an app: Basic Symbols with Sounds.

Name vs Sound

This can be confusing. Just remember to keep the names of the letters separate in your mind from their sounds. The ABC Song gives the names of the English letters. This "[h]" letter,

• in English spelling it has a name from the ABC Song, the name is aitch.
• But the sound you hear is [hhh] (no vowel attached, that would be [hə] or [hɑ] not [h]).
• Is there a [h] sound in "aitch". No. The name is not always the sound. So keep them separate: name vs sound.
• Letter names help us to talk about letters, but sounds let us talk in the first place.

Vowels #1: [ə], vowel height, vowel length

[ə] is Home for Vowels

See the Instrument, 2nd row, the first vowel: [+/] (Voiced) and a head with no action. This is a vowel named "schwa". Its sound is like waking up [ə], or going to sleep, [ə]; it has no action to spread or squeeze anywhere.

Schwa, [ə], is like home for speech. With no constriction or special movement; the vibration is equal, cross-sectional area is equal throughout. The mouth generally goes back to schwa after speaking, starts at schwa before speaking. Speech is basically actions and gestures that start from schwa, move away from schwa, and eventually move back to schwa. Even in Devanagari it is the default vowel, अ, [ə].

Length

Teacher note: Point to the short black rectangle, saying "this means less."
Point to the long black rectangle, say "this means more."

So [ɑ] short, [ɑː] long. [ɑ ɑː, u uː, i iː, o oː, e eː, ɔ ɔː, æ æː]. Teacher note: Demonstrate them all, repeating them; students should repeat with you for each one. Okay? They should nod if they got it, but you want to hear them say it. This is a good time for everyone to pronounce all 15 vowels, before teaching all the symbols.

Height: three degrees of vowel opening

Next explain the features by inquiry on the easiest example, [ɑ],

1. Essence, voiced open.

2. Where else is the down arrow, "open"? (Answer: e and o)

3. Three kinds of down-arrows: none [i u], regular [e o], and big [æ ɔ].
   Linguistics calls these as degrees of opening or of height: high, mid, and low.
   Say them in order by height and feel the jaw open one step each time:

   high vs mid: [i e i e] [u o u o]
   high vs mid vs open: [i e æ i e æ] [u o ɔ u o ɔ]

Consonants #1: actions

We discuss action before place, because actions are simple and clear when taught first. The actions are the things you can do to your mouth's tube. They are variations on closing and opening, a list that we will now go over, the same things, over and over. Let's begin.

1. Study the drawings in the left column page 2; learn their interpretation, how they describe each action.

2. Teachers should also learn their names. These are Nasal (see Level 2), then Stop, Fricative, Flap/Trill, Approximant, and Lateral.

   A future teacher should write these six names as labels on the six rows.

3. Five descriptions (after Nasal):
   • Stop has emphasis on opening after a full close.

   • Fricative is nearly-closed to make a narrow path slightly holding back the lung pressure's fast-blowing air, so that air hisses noisily at that place. You can also blow into your fingers to make it. Not a whistle, but a hiss, where there is more air than space through a small path, and the air breaks up and tumbles. We call it frication.
   • Flap is a ballistic bounce, close-and-open fast. Multiple bounces: a Trill.
   • Approximant means approximately closed, just not so closed as to make frication.
   • Lateral is an approximant fully closed on the center line, but open on the sides.
4. Five opportunities to let students describe what is happening.

   Look at the five action drawings.

   • Teacher says: What is the meaning of each?
     
   • Teacher does: Let each student describe it to learn what is communicated by these drawings.
     
   • Teacher says: Praise, because whatever they say if it's bad it's Veatch's fault if it's good it's their credit.
     
   • Teacher does: Take notes for feedback; this is a chance to learn to improve the drawings.

5. Five explanations of the drawings.

   What's new and important about this work is the drawings. Before drawings, knowledge of phonetics came through incomprehensible words, which hide as much as they reveal, unless you were taught directly. Phonetics was taught only in universities, only in linguistics departments, only in classes on phonetics and phonology. This powerful tool of the scientists of language: a secret.

   Therefore understand the drawings.

   The five action drawings (Page 2, left column) show a tube and a door.

   The tube shows a straightened-out model of the vocal tract from glottis to lips. Like the head faces left here, the tube represents the airway with air flowing from right to left.

   In the middle of this tube is some kind of a doorway or closing or obstruction which might be your tongue or lips doing something.

   Our ears are quite good at hearing things closing and opening and pops and noises inside chambers. We can almost hear the shape and size inside from the interior echoes. So the door location and what it is doing are very distinguishable to human ears.

   The dashes show a possible tube extending past a door: maybe real, maybe not. If the possible tube is not real, then the lips are the door and no actual tube extends beyond them. If the possible tube is actually real, it means the door is inside the tube like the tongue, which is inside the mouth. Or the door might be somewhere along inside the tube (from dental to velar), in which case the tube does extend past the door. Then the dashed lines indicate the entire downstream part of the tube after the door out to the lips.

   Now let's pay attention to the door itself.

   First, the door may be moving or not, as shown by arrows.

   • Arrows:
     • If moving it might be closed and then open: a stop. See the one arrow, it shows the door opens.

     • Or it might quickly close and open in a bounce: a flap. See the two arrows, one closing one opening, in a single, quick, bouncing movement.

   • No arrows, no movement, but different kinds of openings.
     • It might be so nearly closed that air hisses noisily as pressure pushes it fast through the narrow opening: a fricative. The drawing shows the lines begin after the small open groove in the door top. The lines are irregular indicating for turbulence, the chaos of hissing noisy air movement. When this action occurs at the glottis for [h] we call it by the name "aspiration".
     • Slightly more open, the obstruction does not create its own noise. The vibrating air vibrates all around it: an approximant.

       The radiating curves show glottal voicing that continues to vibrate out even after the door.

       Two approximants, [y w], are physically just the extreme vowels [i] and [u]. [ɑi] and [ɑy] may be physically the same. Since languages use movement and change to indicate consonants, we can also describe [y w] as approximants or glides. Start from [ɑ] and move continuously toward [i] without stopping there. That glide is [i] used as a consonant, and we write it [y].

     • Last, one kind of approximant has the center-line closed, with opening on the sides: a lateral. See the shape of the door: its top follows the curvature of the tube, but there are openings on the sides. The name of [l] is "ell".

   In this way the drawing unambiguously pick out each different action.

   Teacher note: A Teacher should know different ways to teach the actions:

   • by their names,
   • by demonstrating them with examples,
   • by the drawings taught implicitly if possible or with explicit interpretation if necessary,
   • by verbal descriptions of movements and shapes and places,
   • by having students repeat after your examples, or identify your examples according to its action,
   • by students sharing their understanding.

   The Teacher should be able to try all these ways to communicate the idea of each action, doing their best for the student to get the idea. Improvements in these drawings are requested from the public. Report suggestions please!

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Level 2: vowels forward vs backward; the five places by bursts, then nasals, tone, and CVC practice

Vowels #2: forward vs backward, at lips or tongue

We learn sounds in contrasts. Vowels come in pairs or triples that differ in one thing.

The Basic Vowels have three gestures (a.k.a. features or gunas but here, sets of arrows), one each for [ɑ], [i], [u].

We already did [ɑ], now let's do [u i u i]. Repeat after me [u i u i u i]. Teacher does: check everyone is doing it; encourage the shy ones to really do it, no, really.

Do you notice the lips moving? Do the lips move forward and backward?
Teacher says: Which has lips forward, [u] or [i] ? Teacher note: usually they guess right.
So [u i] moves lips from forward to backward, do you agree?

What about the tongue can you tell the tongue moves backward and forward?
Teacher says: Which has tongue body forward, [u] or [i] ?
(Teacher note: many guess wrong; to them I say, put a cracker in your mouth, then try [u i u i] and see what your tongue is actually doing. You will discover the tongue moves backward in [u] and forward in [i]. If prepared, pass out some crunchy garbanzo bean salt snacks.)

Everyone should be in agreement then, [u] to [i] is lips forward, tongue backward, to lips backward, tongue forward.

So, do you see that is what the arrows say? Look at the pair of drawings, what is the difference?

Teacher can use hands near face one in front representing lips and one to the side representing tongue, and show an iconic movement of hands apart with [u] and together with [i].

To review:

• Make [u], see that [u] is "tongue backward, lips forward" ("move both apart"). See the arrows. Imitate it. Create voicing. That is [u]. Or do [u], and see if you can persuade yourself that [u] has its lips forward and its tongue back.

• Make [i], see that [i] is "tongue forward, lips backward" ("move both together"). See arrows. Imitate, with voicing. That is [i].

Consonants #2: places

We show consonant location as five places by demonstrating with the voiceless stop bursts. Repeat until they do it too, then next, for each one, following the place drawings. Some languages use more places but we leave those for advanced study.

• Flip the page to the consonant/tone side.
  
• Say: 5 Places 6 Actions, sweeping finger over all column headings, all row headings.

Ask the students to listen as you produce voiceless burst sounds from each place of articulation, with finger moving to each Place drawings.

Teacher says (burst only, no vowels): [p p p, t t t, ʈ ʈ ʈ, č č č, k k k]

Then train by testing:

Train by testing, with stop bursts

Teacher indicates different places in random order: make the burst sound
3x, pause for student to think about guessing, then point to the
answer. Do each in a round once through.

Teacher test in random order: burst 3x, ask student to point to the answer.
Repeat until stable: at least until they get "labial" from [p p p].

If they got all, explain what they have done. Teacher says: "You know all five places!"

The Nasal Proof: [m]

Teacher says: Make the [mmm] sound. Teacher does: listen so everyone does it.
Teacher says: How long can you do it? As long as you want, right? mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Teacher note: Find some way to check that they got it.

Teacher says: "Watch me stop it. Say mmmmm... and Pinch the nose." Teacher note: If they are having fun with you they will do it too.
Teacher says: You cannot continue to make [mmmmmmmmm] when the nose is closed.

Teacher note: if time, try with [n, ɳ, ñ, ŋ]. Is it true that they all need the nose open?

So these require nose open because nose closed makes them stop.

Because they need the nose, we call them nasals, in all the different places. Okay?

That is the sixth action, the nasal. Now let us do the first letter [m].

Teacher says: In [m] is there voice? h,-,+? Wait for Yes. See [+] means voice.
In [m] is the nose open? Wait for Yes. See the drawing that shows Nasal.
In [m] are the lips closed? Wait for Yes. See the drawing means the place is at the Lips.

The nasals at the same five places

Now the nasal at each of the five places you already know from the bursts: [m, n, ɳ, ñ, ŋ].

Can you see the arrows, produce the sounds, and percieve the sounds as being at those places?

[m, n, ɳ, ñ, ŋ].

Teacher note:test with random ones: is there voice, is it nasal, what is the place?

See the drawings, point at the place for [m, n, ɳ, ñ, ŋ]. Say each in multiple syllables with schwa: [mə mə mə], [nə nə nə], [ɳə ɳə ɳə], [ñə ñə ñə], [ŋə ŋə ŋə].

Teacher says: "Now you know [m, n, ɳ, ñ, ŋ], all the places, and one action."
Finally, train by testing with the nasals in pairs, exactly as with the bursts.

Location or Place:

labial vs dental: [m n m n] (not too fast)
dental vs retroflex: [n ɳ n ɳ] same as [d ɖ d ɖ]
retroflex vs palatal: [ɳ ñ ɳ ñ] same as [ɖ ǰ ɖ ǰ], [ʈ č ʈ č]
palatal vs velar: [ñ ŋ ñ ŋ] [č k č k] [ǰ g ǰ g]

The 4 tone marks

This Instrument offers 4 clear phonetic tone patterns: high, low, falling, rising. Each has its mark: above for high, below for low, "acute" for rising, "grave" for falling. (Acute and grave are the French names for these marks.) Just remember: left to right, high is up, low is down. Then you can draw these marks correctly without thinking more about it.

Here, I am satisfied if you simply recognize the phonetic values here: say some vowels each with high, low, falling, rising, see that each vowel can have each tone separately.

Practice: CVC reading and transcription (voiceless stops plus h and any vowel)

Teacher, app, or students can provide pronunciation models to say or write. For example: [pɑt, tɑp, kɑp, hɑt, ʈɑk, čɑk, pɑk, tɑk, kɑt, hɑk]. The best would be real and relevant namely actual words from the students' own language pronounced with these sounds.

Teacher note: Dialect differences may arise from student-provided examples. Wonderful! Each can write different dialects' pronunciation of cognate words using the actual sounds used. We seek truth by describing what happens, not moral judgement and superiority by viewing others as wrong or degenerate. Learn that sounds change in common patterns over history, forming fascinating dialects. Are French and Spanish wrong? Are Hindi and Bengali wrong? No.

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Level 3: the vowel triangle, lax vowels, the consonants they already say by drills on the chart, then the new ones one by one

Vowels #3: the vowel triangle and lax vowels

First the whole vowel triangle: the corner vowels and the vowels between them, each in its place: these are on the periphery.

Then the lax vowels [ʊ] (as in "put"), [ɪ] ("bit"), [ɛ] ("bet") and [ʌ] ("but"). Mostly these are reduced gestures starting from [ə] and moving toward a vowel at the edge of the triangle, perhaps a version of it: [ʊ] of [u], [ɪ] of [i], [ɛ] of [e], [ʌ] of [ɑ]. Teach each by contrast with that vowel: [u ʊ], [i ɪ], [e ɛ], [ɑ ʌ ə].

Consonants #3: the ones they already say, by the chart's two axes

The student already says these sounds every day. The only work is to connect each one to its cell on the chart. The chart has two axes, place across and action down, so each drill below holds one axis still and moves along the other.

Vowels vibrate as a whole, they have no particular place. Consonants have a place and an action that happens at that place. One place can also have different actions.

Down a column: one place, all six actions

The actions are 6. With your finger go down the retroflex column and pronounce each one: [ɳ ɖ ʈ ʐ ʂ ɽ ɚ ɭ].

Try a few different actions at labial place [m p b w]. Do you agree all are labial?

Along a row: one action, all five places

Compare [p] vs [k]: what is different? (Place) What is same (Stop, voiceless)? Action.

Teacher says: Can you do a stop at the lips? Voiced and voiceless: [b, p].
Can you do a stop at the teeth? Voiced and voiceless: [d, t].
Can you do a stop farther behind the teeth? Voiced and voiceless: [ɖ, ʈ].
Can you do a stop at the palate? Voiced and voiceless: [č, ǰ]
Can you do a stop at velar place? Voiced and voiceless: [g, k]

In South Asia, after the voiced and voiceless stops, do the aspirated stops at each place the same way.

Same place, different action: check it with eyes closed

First review the idea of place with [m, n, ɳ, ñ, ŋ]:

• at velar place, say [ɑkɑ ɑgɑ ɑŋɑ]. Close eyes, repeat, watch your tongue, same place!
  
• at dental place say [ɑnɑ ɑdɑ ɑtɑ ɑlɑ], close eyes, repeat, watch the tongue. Are they in one place? Yes.
  
• at lips say [ɑmɑ ɑbɑ ɑpɑ ɑwɑ]. Same location? Yes.

Same location but different action!

Teacher says: In one place we have [kə gə ŋə], what are the actions?
Are [kə] and [gə] different by voiced unvoiced? Yes.
Compare the voiced and voiceless stops in pairs each at a single place, training by testing

Different from [ŋə]? Yes, [ŋə] is nasal.
What is the action for [g] and [k]? See the drawing, with airway closed, suddenly open it.

Does it create [g] and [k] when voiced and voiceless?
Teacher note:watch them try, see, think, absorb, accept, use this.

Two places that share each action

Contrast 2 places with 6 actions. For each of the 6 actions, two locations can share that action: [ɳ ñ, ɖ ǰ, ʈ č, z ž, s š].

Teacher says: "It's time for practice, then a break, then later we can do more explanations."

Practice time

Practise outside class with an app: write what you hear.

Write each new letter as in Level 1, saying each out loud.

Now write [nɑ, nɑmɑh, hɑm, mɑːhɑː, nɑːn, nɑːnɑː, mɑŋ] (name of [dɑːl]), [mɑn].

Practice any local or English word, students' choice (any CVCVC combination): one student asks for a word, everyone hears it, writes it, discusses it, and reads it back.
Now write [nəməsteː] ...
Look for some words on signs which you can say now and write them for practice.
Keep looking at signs and reading everything you can.
Even if little comes, every time you recognize a letter it is progress.
Enjoy the curiosity and your sense of progress!

Consonants #3, continued: the new ones, one by one

Which consonants are new depends on the student's language. Take them in this order, easiest first: sounds they already hear in borrowed words (in South Asia, Marathi [ɭ], English [f v, w ɚ ɫ], Farsi [æ ɔ, x ɣ]); then pairs that another language keeps apart but theirs merges into one native sound ([v w], [s š ʂ], [θ ð]), where the features show the difference; last, the sounds that stay hard even after practice, such as European [ʀ] and some Advanced sounds, which few learners will need.

Most of the new ones are fricatives. Frication can be very loud [s] or very quiet [θ], deep in the mouth [h] or out at the lips [ɸ], and fricatives have more places than the chart's five: bilabial [β ɸ], labiodental [v f], interdental [ð θ], then alveolar [z s]. Each sound below has a row: how to make it, who finds it hard, what they hear instead, and its story.

[f v]	[f v] are made with the lower lip against the upper teeth: labiodental, not bilabial. Blow, without voice for [f], with voice for [v]. If you cannot see the teeth, say Show your teeth; then you will hear the right thing. [f] is quiet, often near silence. Japanese speakers make a bilabial [ɸ] instead, blowing between both lips, a small error; others hear [f v] as [p b].
[θ ð]	[θ ð] are made with the tongue through the teeth: blow, without voice for [θ], with voice for [ð]. English writes them both with "th" while IPA writes them differently, using Greek theta and Old English eth. They are not Hindi [th], which is a stop plus breath, and Hindi speakers hear them as that. Speakers who find them new still make them easily: stick your tongue through your teeth and blow. [θ] is one of the quietest sounds in language. Teacher note: if you don't see the tongue sticking out between the teeth it is wrong; demand to see it. Much laughter! If it violates gender rules then ask same-sex students to check each other.
[s š ʂ]	[s š ʂ] are three hisses with the tongue: tip constricting at the alveolar ridge behind the teeth for [s], curled back for [ʂ]. Tongue blade makes a groove at the palate for [š]; I know this as the "be quiet" sound. The Instrument's extra fricatives row shows these clearly in additional place-of-articulation drawings. Sanskrit had all three, voiceless; descendant languages have merged them into two or one, so their speakers hear them as each other and must learn the difference by ear. I write [s z] for dentals and [š ž] for palatal fricatives. The hacek, [ˇ], is part of the palatal glide [y]; Americanist-trained phoneticians like me use it in [š ž c-hacek j-hacek], although the official IPA writes [ʃ ʒ tʃ dʒ]. Why? No palatal stops exist, written [t] or [d], and no stop-affricate distinction holds for palatals in any language, so digraph tʃ dʒ are simply wrong, and let's just use hacek to mean palatal. Please forgive the controversy, and learn to recognize both.
[x ɣ]	[x ɣ] are hisses with the back of the tongue near the soft palate, without and with voice. Languages like English lack them, and their speakers hear [k g]. Hindi and Urdu acquired them from Persian: [xɑːn] (khan), [ɣələt] (galat), along with [f] and [z]. If your language lacks them, ignore them; a phonetician should learn a little German, which has them.
[ɾ]	[ɾ] is one quick tap of the tongue tip behind the teeth: a bouncing ball that touches once. Several bounces make a trill; strict IPA writes the trill as [r], but in the wild the "r" symbol is a cover term for the many sounds behind the world's r's. In the retroflex region the same tap takes the retroflex tail, [ɽ]. English speakers make the flap instead of [t] or [d] in words like writer and rider. They think they hear an actual "t" or "d", because of the spelling. So they need to be taught that /t, d/ between strong and weak stress become [ɾ].
[ʀ]	[ʀ] is a trill of the uvula against the back of the tongue. Native speakers of French and German do it beautifully but I still cannot do this sound, myself, without frication, some mix of [x] or the uvular hiss (Americanist [X]) with [ʀ]. If you never need to use it, at least learn to recognize it. Listen to Edith Piaf singing Je Ne Regrette Rien and try it. It is in the chart because it is in the IPA, not because many learners will need it.
[ɚ]	[ɚ] is the American English r: tongue tip curled back, not touching, voice through the gap, a retroflex glide. I know of only two languages that use [ɚ]: American English and Beijing Mandarin, but perhaps also Tamil. The rest of the world finds it impossible and substitutes one of [ɾ, l, ə, :]. Most can learn it easily using these drawings: just do what they show. I wrote much of my thesis on it. It is an amazing sound.
[l ɭ ɫ]	[l ɭ ɫ] are laterals: the tongue touches the roof of the mouth somewhere along the centerline, with the tip or with the body behind it, and voice passes around the sides. The clear ell [l] closes the tip behind the teeth and keeps the back of the tongue low. That is Hindi [l], Jamaican Creole, and English at the start of a syllable. In English syllable-final ell is dark, i.e. velarized, and lacks tongue tip contact: [ɫ], as in "well". In my thesis on the Chicago dialect I measured hundreds of these; the ell and the vowel before it can merge until the two together sound like [ʊ]. In Pittsburgh it becomes a back unrounded vowel. In various Slavic languages an "l" sound may turn into [u] or [w]. Vedic Sanskrit has a retroflex l, as does Marathi and South Indian languages. Its symbol uses the retroflex tail, [ɭ]: the tongue tip curls back and closes, and voice passes around the sides. Palatal laterals are discussed later.

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Level 4: review of vowel triangle and difficult consonants; test

Vowels: review the whole vowel triangle from Level 3. Consonants: review, practise and test the locally difficult consonants (the list is in Level 3): read and speak, hear and transcribe.

In class practise with words volunteered by a student. Stand up, say it, half of students write it, the other half read the result, the volunteer is judge of correct pronunciation.

Practise outside class with an app: more sounds, in words.

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Level 5

The Instrument includes Basic and Intermediate IPA sounds with some Americanist tweaks. Advanced sounds would include:" Vowels whose lip-rounding goes against the usual pattern: tongue forward with lips forward, [y] and [ø] (French, German), and tongue back with lips back, [ɯ] and [ɤ] (Japanese, Korean, Turkish). Diacritics: small marks added to a letter to adjust it a little, such as [h] included in a stop [pʰ], nasal vibration on top of a vowel [ã], and raised [e^˔], lowered [e^˕], fronted [e^˂], backed [e^˃] to shift a vowel from its canonical value. The full chart is at the International Phonetic Association website.

This course's letters and the official IPA

This course writes some sounds the way American linguists have long written them (the Americanist tradition), not the way the official IPA chart does. Both are in use; a learner who reads one can read the other with this table.

Sound	This course	Official IPA
"ch" in church	[č]	[tʃ]
"j" in judge	[ǰ]	[dʒ]
"sh" in shoe	[š]	[ʃ]
"s" in measure	[ž]	[ʒ]
"y" in yes	[y]	[j] (IPA [y] is a vowel: [i] with rounded lips)
"ñ" in Spanish niño	[ñ]	[ɲ]
breath after a stop	[ph], [bh]	[pʰ], [bʱ]
the vowels in my, cow, boy	[ay], [aw], [oy]	[aɪ], [aʊ], [ɔɪ]
English r, as in her	[ɚ]	[ɹ] before a vowel, [ɚ] or [ɝ] as a vowel
high and low tone	[ɑ̄] high, [ɑ̱] low	[ɑ́] high, [ɑ̀] low, [ɑ̄] mid

Practise outside class with an app: write what you hear, harder.

Tone languages

To interpret the tone drawings, the keys are three.

• Big heavy slow has a low tone.
• Small light fast has a high tone.
• Sound travels away from a center at its source; the past is far from center, the present is at the center.

With these keys you can interpret the tone drawings.

Most languages are not tone languages: ignore the tone marks, and if you like use the macron over a vowel for length instead of the colon or the doubled symbol. If yours is a tone language with other tones, invent marks for them. For the tune of a sentence use punctuation: ? for a question, , for a list, . for the end of a statement.

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Level E: English

This section is provided for students interested in English.

English steps:

• 1) Be comfortable reading/writing IPA via Levels 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. Pass this. Now you are standing on the ground and know what you're talking about.

• 2) Learn the Easy Bit of English Spelling, Good Phonics.
• 3) Then look at Bad Phonics (sidebar) to persuade yourself that pronunciation guesses are indeed wild guesses - temporary ONLY and urgently to be replaced through constant search for a reliable pronunciation.

• 4) Then learn words:
  • Discover IPA in the dictionary -- for the pronunciation!

  • Every word is triple by content and confidence. Know the meaning, the spelling AND the pronunciation. And, did you guess or you really know.

    For every new word:

    • Remember what you know or merely guessed
    • Remain curious, to replace guesses with trustworthy truth.

  • Learning this way, you are on solid ground and can build a castle of knowledge which will stand for a lifetime.

  • Spend your life learning new knowledge and words in this way.

English vs IPA

The ABC Song teaches letter names, not sounds. Don't rely on them for pronunciation.

Use Good Phonics (see the sidebar) where possible; memorize these reliable letters.

Even Bad Phonics with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 ways to say any given letter or two, at least reduces the field of random options.

But the rest is indeed guessing. For a decent guess you can use IPA pronunciations to read English text. English letters are already included within the IPA; the whole English alphabet is re-used, so an IPA reader knows an IPA pronunciation for all of the letters. The result is commonly imperfect, and often really terrible, but surprisingly often, IPA gives a serviceable, temporary guess. Start with IPA reading, but just remember it is a guess, a normally-wrong, often terrible, wild, wild guess. In the end, be responsible: listen for that word from a trustworthy model, or look it up. THEN you will know exactly how to say it, for the rest of your life.

Therefore let this be your method: Guess Then Verify.

I must apologize for the mess of the English language, which is the cause of all this complexity. I wrote 330 pages for a PhD dissertation titled, "English Vowels", so I have suffered more than you will.

Educated English speakers may be confused when they expect a letter name and get an IPA sound. So it is not bad to learn the ABC song: watch YouTube and sing along. Then you can give those English speakers an easy time by using their arbitrary and nonsensical names.

But we USE language more than we TALK ABOUT language. The letter names of the ABC Song let you talk about English spellings. More important is to know the sounds themselves, and their order in each word. Your inner language computer learns, stores and uses them, often quite easily, given the right prompt in the right context. Our job is to find that easy path.

Okay, enough. Conclusions:

To speak out loud, you may use the IPA letter SOUNDS as temporary guesses.

To clarify for confused readers you may write with double quotation marks for English spelling and brackets for IPA as in

"Veatch" → [vi:č]

This is the normal practice of properly educated linguists: Just put brackets around your phonetic transcriptions.

Start with phonetic transcription, marking it with [ ], to stand on the foundation of reality.

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More for the curious

Nothing on this tab is needed to teach or to learn the alphabet. It is for the reader who wants to know more.

How to Learn

The trick of learning is to find something so simple and easy that you already know almost everything, where you can figure out the missing part.

The reason babies can learn language so quickly is that it is so easy to speak to them at their level. Babies understand nothing, expect little, and show with great clarity when they learn something new. All this helps the adult talk to them in the simplest language at the edge of their knowledge, where they already know almost everything.

Every sentence, that has only one unknown feature, teaches it to you if that feature can be understood from the rest. So seek out simple things to read, and put on your learning hat.

The path to excellent reading -- comfortably as if talking -- is to read and read, and keep reading forever, going from easy to difficult material. Patience! Easy readings are the most important. They let you climb the first rungs of learning in that language.

An excellent reader moves the eyes freely around the text. They pick up definite clues from unambiguous letters and known words, and combine those clues with the context and the activities described. This is both reading AND learning.

An excellent reader extracts clear unambiguous information by scanning for those definite clues, then inferring what else must have a certain meaning for the whole to remain meaningful. Then even the unknown becomes known because its meaning is evident from the context.

Be patient and curious; tolerate your own partial ignorance as you learn. No one can know or learn everything, just as YouTube receives more than 24 hours of uploaded video each day, so no one can watch everything. Still, you can learn anything you want. I encourage you to keep using what you know, keep learning new ideas, words, scripts, and languages.

Mine are Hindi, Sanskrit, and English, and any language of the place that I am staying. Maybe you could learn those.

Don't limit your future based on your present. Learning builds upon itself so if you keep learning there is no upper limit to your personal knowledge and capabilities.

Why one example is enough (from Level E)

Teacher Note: One instance can be a counterexample destroying an entire theory. One instance can be the example that proves a new possibility. Therefore you can actually learn 100% truth of a certain kind of truth from a single case. What kind of truth? The truth that a trustworthy model CAN pronounce this word this way. The current fashion says that to "know" anything, large numbers of examples must be summarized by statistics and machine learning. Yet in the right context this kind of learning, for language, is just as trustworthy, and a sound inference by logic and by science.

Indeed, anyone who has learnt a word's pronunciation by looking it up once in a dictionary knows that single instance learning is possible.

In this case, replacing a Very Temporary guess with a trustworthy model's pronunciation of a word is a valid inference that locks in a reliable truth after a single observed instance.

The letter names and the Great Vowel Shift (from Level E)

May I share something fun? The NAME for the letter "e" is pronounced [iː]. This came from the long history of the English language, over 600 years ago, in a sound change called the Great Vowel Shift. Someday, please read about the Great Vowel Shift and then English spelling will make a little more sense.

Phonemes and allophones (from Level E)

In Linguistics we can also use / / to indicate that we are writing with language-particular sound categories, we often call them "phonemes". Phonemes may include multiple different IPA sounds as "allophones" or alternative forms, of the one category. In Hindi, for example, [v] and [w] can be described as allophones of the /v/ phoneme. I encourage all students and teachers to become Linguists: learn the allophonic structure of every language you meet, and publish your work. It will surely be welcome in this scientific community.

My gift to you is the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA: learn it, share it, and ask those who learn it to share it (the reasons are in the Introduction).

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Teacher Training

Approach

The Teacher's approach must be first to love and respect your students.

Respect: To make the listener comfortable when we talk about literacy you may need to say these things:

• Illiteracy is not shameful.
  
• You are intelligent, hardworking, earnest, respectful and respectable.

• But if we look forward, life can be better in the future with literacy.
  
• Let's build a better future together, student and teacher.

• It takes paper and pencil and light and quiet and something to write on.
  
• It takes time, effort, attention, practice.
• In a week or a month, see if you are unhappy.

Love:

• If they don't want it, don't give too much!
  
  • Reflect on yourself: is their refusal from your disrespect or any sense of superiority?
    Fix your approach to love and respect.
    
• Schedule time and place to return and repeat and review and expand.
  This sets them up for success: a form of love.
  
• If a session has gone too long, give a break until they are ready, next minute, hour, day, week. Not more than a week.
  
• If delay continues long, bring them back to the material. Review is helpful, several times review, several times practice. New information should be reviewed after 15 minutes, an hour, later in the day, tomorrow, after a week. Find a way for the student to talk about it themselves, so you can see if they got it right and so that it connects to other knowledge and stick. Give a chance to practice, both reading and writing, as per Level 1. Then it will stick.

• Break knowledge into pieces small enough to fully accept while wanting more.
  
• Keep watching their interest level and their understanding, keep adjusting to get both.
  
• While empowering their future self, don't make them suffer on the way. Already they are trying!
  
• When they get something, do something right, praise them!
  
  • Double the experience emotionally and intellectually with praise, saying what they did.

Teacher note: Fun unlocks fearless performance. If they are having fun with you they will do it too. Don't avoid doing a correct demonstration because of your sense of personal dignity. At the right time, both describe and perform the voiceless bilabial trill. It's okay to laugh. Stick out your tongue for [θ ð]. If you are too dignified they won't do it either.

Motivations

The motivations are Travel, Messages, Transactions.

• Travel (signs, directions, maps) to arrive and know it, not to be lost or captured.
  Where are you? Directions, signs, maps say where. How will you get home without following directions and reading signs and maps? Read signs everywhere, read anything you can.
• Messages (far, future, past) to give and receive (your people far, the future unborn, the past grandparents or teachers). This message.
  Write letters to your people. Your will after death, a family history so that your descendants won't forget you. Family recipes. Post signs for others to read. Write poetry, stories, your special knowledge: share it!
• Transactions (receipt, exchange agreement (contract)) to avoid deceit and fraud: so you really own the result. Write receipts, exchange agreements, contracts. Your will after your death. Put your name on your stuff. Buy and sell with a written receipt or a contract: write it down now to defend it later, and own what you own.

Give a concrete example, such as:

• Travel. Illiterate women asking directions because they cannot read signs are vulnerable to misdirection, capture, and enslavement. How will she ever escape and arrive home without reading signs?!

• Does anyone have loved ones far away? Who? If you can read and write you send a message, this one is sick, that one is born, everyone is healthy. Without reading/writing by yourself you depend on the discretion of others: where is your privacy? What if your message is difficult or shameful, but you want their love, support, advice, and help. Learn together, then each can read and write for yourself.

• A written message can be saved, becomes immortal.

  Write to your unborn children or grandchildren, what is your message. Read from your ancestors or wise teachers, what they want you to know.

• To buy or sell invites fraud and abuse. During the exchange, write and keep a receipt: when, who, what, how much. Then no one can say price or quantity or description is wrong. Agree for a future exchange, in writing. Written agreed terms cannot be changed without written agreement, and a judge will also agree: only if you have written evidence.

• In Doiwala on the street I gave it to a nice mother of grown sons, who complained her sons were unmarried. I said, marriage is more difficult for the illiterate. Yes.

  It means that one is more capable in everything with the ability to read. Maybe the message is a job instruction. What job can you do without reading?

Watch out! Danger! This could easily become a harassment and abuse session in which you insistently tell an illiterate person all his or her disadvantages. Everyone knows their own disadvantages much more intimately than anyone else. So just touch on these a little bit and see what can motivate them positively. Motivate yourself, really. But the goal is motivation not depression. Put each point positively, what good you can achieve with literacy, what bad you could avoid with literacy. Keep eyes on the future benefit not the past costs.

Scripts

Script is not language.

"Prince Chowk"

प्रिंस चौक

is written in both Devanagari and Roman letters: languages both, scripts both. Here I see signs with English words written in Devanagari script, while Hindi words are also written in English/Roman script. Any language can come in any script.

Here we have 3 Scripts: Devanagari, English, Phonetic. What shall we learn first?

The first step needs to be simple, practical, accessible and safe.
Our principle must be 1 sound 1 letter. If not 1-1 then it is...

• no longer simple but complex,
• less practical because harder to learn,
• inaccessible when even the so-called rules are wrong, and
• unsafe because you cannot trust how to say the letters.
  

English writing is difficult. My name is Veatch, 6 letters, but 3 sounds only. Not 1-1!
Devanagari is hard to draw phonetically: one letter /kha/ is 3 sounds. Not 1-1!
A Phonetic Alphabet is simple, easy to draw, write, read: 1 sound 1 letter: 1-1!
A Phonetic Alphabet also helps read English immediately, with adjustments. Signs can be read usefully.
.. also helps learn Devanagari easily and accurately.
.. also helps learn ANY language, write ANY language (including unwritten languages!)

Teacher's checklist: before, during, after

Before

• First, identify potential students who cannot yet read.

• Pick a venue: wherever they are, a home, a shop, a temple, a schoolroom, the roadside; anywhere two people can sit with the Instrument between them.

• Agree a schedule: perhaps 6 classes of 30 minutes (see the Structure), and the review times given under Approach above.

• Meet them anywhere, or invite them, especially in groups, to come together and learn basic phonetic literacy.

• Greet them with respect and love; ask if wanted; explain why.

• Before class, find or write down your own local example-word list: 3-4 words the students already know by sound, a local "A-for-Apple". Then their first successful decoding is a word they recognize. The instrument itself carries no word-examples or technical terms to confuse any learner anywhere. Examples are the teacher's job, done in the local language.

Pre-test

• Show three or four cards with Devanagari, 3-4 with a Roman letter.

• Ask: What is this? Write their answers with their names; No is a good answer. Did they know the letter by name or sound?

• Write their name and these pretest results with date and location. Pretest results are the Most Important.

• If they can sing ABC, name each letter, write their name, and read signs, receipts and to-do lists, they hardly need this alphabet. They already have some basic functional literacy, at least. But find out if parents and siblings can all read too. Make Teachers of them; they may only lack authorization and encouragement to teach. If present, show how: teach the illiterate one(s) with the literate one watching over. Invite the literate one to tutor the illiterate one later at home, to help them practice, to quiz their understanding, to join our movement and help.
• In India a person who names the Devanagari letters but not the Roman ones can still benefit from learning IPA. IPA kickstarts English reading, and 80% of Delhi and Kolkata signage is in Roman letters.

During

• Give out the instrument, one to every person.
• From the start give out a practice writing notebook and a pen or pencil to each student, since then they can really practice immediately. This is our gift to them, and they can start drawing Smiley Faces, immediately. Draw a sample and say Copy That; encourage anything they do, and more practice till they like it. After drawing a smiley face they have already done O and U and i, which are parts of it. So they can have confidence to do the rest.

• Teach them the Lessons, starting at Level 0, voiceless, voiced, then aspiration ([h]) then brackets (around whole words or utterances not every letter), then [ə] then [ɑ] then [ː] (length) then [h ɑ h ɑ] = [hɑhɑ]. Keep going, give breaks, practice, use it on their own language, any word or any recorded audio of one syllable. We want them to be able to write whatever they hear using IPA, so practice a variety. Add Advanced symbols as needed, one by one.

Post-test

• After each level, show the same cards again and write the results beside the pretest, so the gain is plain to see.

After

• Collect and periodically send those results directly to us at Phoneticians.com (tom@phoneticians.com), so we can add them to the scientific data on this. If you need help putting them together, your Master-Teacher will help.

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Master-Teacher Training

Master-Teacher Expectations

A Master-Teacher is a competent IPA Teacher who has acquired the ability to teach new IPA Teachers, and raise them up to become Master-Teachers in turn.

Literacy succeeds more with more readers; every sign's audience grows as more people get literate. So every literate person's interests are served by this work of passing on literacy.

But our main job is to raise more and more Master-Teachers. Why? The link from a Master-Teacher to a new Master-Teacher is the replicating, viral unit. Our job together is too big for any one or even any government, but we can do it together through this cascade: from each Master-Teacher to many Master-Teachers. When those also cascade to even more Master-Teachers, then this becomes viral with no limit, until all can read. But without Master-Teacher Replication, the work is destined to flame out.

Therefore anyone who can be a Student, who qualifies and can pass it on as a Teacher, should be encouraged to come all the way up to becoming a Master-Teacher, and to pass it on, and to pass on the passing on.

• Strategy. See How It Spreads above.
• Language Competence. I write this in English, so the first Teachers might also speak English, but see the Hindi version; more languages later.

Master-Teacher Tasks

Now, the Master-Teacher's job is to (1) find, (2) motivate, (3) qualify, (4) teach, and (5) test new Teachers, and (6) collect results and report to us.

• (1) Finding potential Teachers. Probably they can read but possibly only using phonetic literacy.

• (2) Motivating potential teachers. It won't make much money; in fact it costs about 20 rupees a student (see Money and Career above).

  The motivations are idealism and meaningfulness. To do this work is to have a meaningful life. Do you know my feeling? How I feel when I think about just the possibility that many people will be empowered by literacy through this work? It overwhelms my heart and tears come up. Think how much fraud and abuse will be stopped, how many loved ones will be in touch, how people will travel fearlessly in this world, which could not happen for them before, because now they can read if only a little, enough to recognize some signs. I am very grateful and humbled, the whole thing is far far beyond me.

• (3) Qualifications. These are required but hardly limiting: most people are qualified.

  Becoming a Teacher requires knowledge, not position or degree: it does not require college, or high school, or elementary school. It does not require competence in a prestigious or major language; being a native speaker of any language is enough.

  A teacher should be a native speaker of some language, able to produce its distinct sounds accurately, with a working mouth, tongue, jaw, larynx, lungs and nose. They must be able to point a finger to each letter while saying its sound.

  Teachers should be able to communicate to some degree with their Students, but perhaps not very much. See useful vocabulary as an example.

  Love and respect for the students, and how to keep a lesson easy, fun and small enough to hold, are under Approach above.

• (4) Master Teacher's Work: Teaching Teachers. A student who has learned IPA and passed the test of an IPA Reader and Writer with unknown content, can become a teacher of IPA. Go through the Levels 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and E together with the student-teacher.

• (5) Testing Teachers. The Master-Teacher should also Test what the Student-Teacher knows, and can do, and whether they are effective in communicating it to Students so that Students actually learn it. Know the check-list: The Student Teacher (a) is responsible to explain each feature so the Students understand and after that (b) is responsible for the Students' competence in at least producing and labelling each sound in the chart, and (c) should record it in a teaching log. Do the check list: The Master Teacher must watch the Student Teacher teach at least one student. Check that every part of every level is remembered, explained so the student can understand it, and recorded on the teaching log. Achieve success: Quality control two generations down, is also the Master Teacher's job. The Master Teacher's responsibility is not just that the Student Teacher knows something, but that the Student Teacher produces successful Students. The Master Teacher must test the Student-Teacher's Student, to see that they did properly understand, and can read and write novel examples using the various IPA letters. Until the Master Teacher tests the Student Teacher's Students and prove that they learned from the Student-Teacher, that Student-Teacher cannot yet be considered a qualified Teacher.

• (6) Results. Your Teachers send their pretest and after-each-level results to us themselves (Teacher's checklist, After). See that they do, and help them put the results together when they ask. The results feed a study of which teaching works. Once enough are in, we will say so, and the sending can stop.

Master-Teacher To Master-Teacher Transmission

After training a teacher, how do they become a Master Teacher? Give them the above material which you studied to become a Master Teacher. Discuss it with them; ask them what they got out of it; test them on it.

Become their colleague and advocate. You know them, what do they need to become responsible, successful, effective? Just think about it and I'm sure you will figure out what is needed. Do the right thing.

Connect them with Phoneticians.com where we will be testing Students, Teachers, and Master Teachers on their relevant capabilities, so we can certify folks at each level.

If your student-teacher knows the material, authorize them to teach it. Why shouldn't a child be able to teach his or her parents and grandparents what they learned? Will it benefit the recipient? If so, we should encourage it. But also point out the responsibility of a teacher to know their material and speak the truth, not to exaggerate or oversell or lie.

And may the world be delivered from involuntary illiteracy.