If you have ever heard a Korean say "I want to go to the bitch" (meaning "I want to go to the beach"),

you should understand the importance of mastering phonetics when learning new languages. To her credit, the Korean is entirely unaware of how she sounds in English. In fact, if you tried to correct her by saying "It s pronounced beach ", she would probably respond with, "That s what I said! bitch." "s such an e#ample illustrates, few people in our society give conscious thought to the sounds they produce and the subtle differences they possess. It is unfortunate, but hardly surprising, that few language$learning boo%s use technical terminology to describe foreign sounds. &anguage learners often hear unhelpful advice such as "It is pronounced more crisply". "s scientists, we cannot be satisfied with this state of affairs. If we can classify the sounds of language, we are one step closer to understanding the gestalt of human communication. The study of the production and perception of speech sounds is a branch of linguistics called phonetics, studied by phoneticians. The study of how languages treat these sounds is called phonology, covered in the ne#t chapter. 'hile these two fields have considerable overlap, it should soon become clear that they differ in important ways. (honetics is the systematic study of the human ability to ma%e and hear sounds which use the vocal organs of speech, especially for producing oral language. It is usually divided into the three branches of ()) articulatory, (*) acoustic and (+) auditory phonetics. It is also traditionally differentiated from (though overlaps with) the field of phonology, which is the formal study of the sound systems (phonologies) of languages, especially the universal properties displayed in "&& languages, such as the psycholinguistic aspects of phonological processing and ac,uisition. -ne of the most important tools of phonetics and phonology is a special alphabet called the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA, a standardi.ed representation of the sounds used in human language. In this chapter, you will learn what sounds humans use in their languages, and how linguists represent those sounds in I(". /eading and writing I(" will help you understand what s really happening when people spea%.