How do you pronounce tomato?

[Teeqoz]

Ka-pi96 said:

Teeqoz said:

Lol, that's true about Japanese. Forgot that.

 

Anyway, seems more like you're just lazy. I mean, I literally learnt phonetic transcription just by looking up a few words I already knew how to pronounse (and I wasn't specifically trying to learn phonetic transcription either).

fon-et-ik-al-lee doesn't tell you for sure how to pronounce the diphtongs and vowels. It just works for you because you know how to pronounce them.

For instance, how do you pronounce the "o" in the "fon" part?

Is it like the o in:

"no"

or

"work"

or

"computer"

As you can see, that's three different ways you pronounce o, and those are just what I got from the top of my head.

Yeah, I'm lazy. Nothing wrong with that

As for your example the o in 'computer' is the natural choice isn't it?

For it to be the o in 'no' then it would either need to have no other letter after it (like 'no') or an e after it (like 'foe' or even 'fone'), would it not?

As for 'work', well nobody should really be using an 'o' for that sound when trying to spell something out phonetically, instead they should use 'er'.

What I'm telling you is that this only works because you know english to such a degree that this makes sense to you either way. Still, letters in english don't correlate directly to a sound, so for people who lack this understanding, this way of writing things is completely useless. It's like saying "Oh, you want to learn how to pronounce english words? Well, first your gonna have to learn how to pronounce english, then you'll be able to make sense of how we are explaining how to pronounce english words. "

Like, how do you explain how the o in "to" and "no" are pronounced so differently? As well as the o in "tone" and "none"? While at the same time, the os in "tone" and "none" also vary from the os in "to" and "no" (well, actually, the o in no and the o in tone are the same, but this just adds to the confusion). You'd go "the o in to is pronounced like the o in "too" which is pronounced like... tuh, but that depends on how you pronounce the u. Maybe like the e in "new"? Meanwhile the o in no is pronounced like the o in go, which is pronounced like the o in.... so..... which is pronounced like the o in... uhm... over?"

(Also please don't attempt to explain how to pronounce those words to me, I know how to, my point is that english is incredibly inconsistent in how to pronounce vowels and diphtongs, and the only reason it works for you to write "fon-et-ik-al-lee" is because you already know english fluently. For someone who don't, this makes no sense.)