Does anybody out there understand the new pronunciation symbols in dictionaries?

New pronunciation symbols?
Long consonants?
Dictionaries?

Say what? Do you have any online examples? I’m flummoxed by what you even mean.

Are you speaking of IPA? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA

I couldn’t read it at first either, but it’s pretty easy to learn and I’m very used to it now.

I love the IPA (if that is what you are referring to) as it directs our attention to specific sounds. There are some sounds in other languages that don’t exist in English, but it’s not too hard to pick those up too. Could you give us an example of the two differing systems you are referring to? I want to make sure we’re on the same page here :)

No. I do not understand IPA.

I cannot read them. Am I alone in this? – @anartist

Regarding the IPA.. holy crap, that’s like trying to read Greek or Russian!

I never have done well regarding phonetics. I did embarrassingly poorly in English (as a second language) in France, mainly because of the teacher’s emphasis on memorizing phonetics and other weird crap we never think about because we speak it natively. It was eye-opening, especially since I was expecting to ace the class.

I had no problem learning it. But I was taught to read using a phonetic method, so I’ve been decoding sound symbols since I was a preschooler. I noticed that some people had real difficulty learning IPA in my linguistics and foreign language classes. I wonder if it is because they were taught to read using a “whole word” or “see-and-say” method?

If you can learn the old dictionary symbols, then you can learn IPA, or at least the IPA symbols for English sounds. Just look at the examples given in the key.

Here is one tip that might help you. English “long vowels” are actually diphthongs in the most widely-spoken dialects—two vowel sounds merged, or a vowel and a semi-vowel, like the ‘oy’ in boy or the ‘ow’ in howl—and IPA represents them as such, using two symbols to represent them, instead of the one symbol that you find in the traditional dictionary system. This might be confusing if you are used to thinking of them as single sounds, but again, just look at the examples in the key.

You can learn the Greek and Russian alphabets too, if you care to. This stuff ain’t rocket science. Think positive.

Cunning linguists do. (You could take a linguistics course to learn how to make sense of IPA).

I’ll be damned. I can’t find the old “guide to Pronunciation” anywhere. They were always in the front of dictionaries. There is one in front of the 10th Webster’s but it is different. Not totally, but somewhat. And stressed syllables used to be shown with accent marks, like
prevaricate

What was the old system called? Where did it go? And when did it disappear?
Did IPA replace it to expand the number of languages that use the same system?

I love having a good IPA while reading the IPA symbols.

That will help a lot!!!