In all my years as an English learner, I thought using the flap t (the d-like sound found e.g. in letter) in American English was simple. When some dictionary publishers started using a special symbol in phonetic transcriptions to represent the flap t, I thought it was a useless gimmick.

That was what I had believed until last week, when I decided to write a FAQ about the flap t. It turns out I hadn’t realized a flap t is pronounced not just between a stressed vowel and an unstressed vowel (e.g. water, betting). There are a lot of other cases where /t/ is flapped. In fact, there are 12 to 15 different positions where that happens. And even this complicated system of rules has exceptions.

Now, when I say I hadn’t realized the flap t was pronounced in so many different positions, I don’t mean I had been pronouncing words incorrectly all those years. Quite the opposite — as I examined the different examples that I found in phonetic sources, I kept finding that my intuition matched the correct pronunciation almost perfectly. For example, I hadn’t known the rule that you pronounce a flap t before a stressed vowel if that vowel begins a word, as in not over. Yet, if you had asked me to say not over, I would have pronounced it with a flap t.

Once again, I realized that input had made me almost a native speaker of English. I can look at a word or phrase and tell you whether it has the flap t or not, without checking any rules. Heck, I could write pretty good rules for using the flap t just by thinking up some examples and checking my own pronunciation. All this is not because I can fly, stop accidents and eat planets. It’s because I’ve listened to thousands of hours of spoken English. Folks, Tom Cruise is not the answer — input is the answer.

So, if you’re going to read my Flap t FAQ, don’t pay too much attention to the rules. Focus on the examples (it has a lot of really good ones). Try to pronounce them. Add them to your collection in SuperMemo, Anki, Mnemosyne, etc. Good luck!

SuperMemo World has quietly released SuperMemo 2008. Most of the new features are clearly designed for incremental reading fanatics, but there is one feature that might be somewhat useful to language learners: You can now input your sleeping hours and SuperMemo will try to estimate whether you are sleepy or fresh when you’re reviewing your items. If it determines you are sleepy, it will assume that your grades are below your normal ability, and will give them a small bump to adjust for the sleepiness.

In other SuperMemo news, there may finally be a way to edit items comfortably on SuperMemo for Pocket PC. Zaid Ahmad wrote to me saying that he has used a free app called MyMobiler to control his Pocket PC from his desktop, including copying & pasting text from his PC to his Pocket PC. This would mean that you can create and edit items remotely on your Pocket PC, while taking advantage of a real keyboard and software dictionaries.

This took me completely by surprise: The Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary is now available from Google for free!

Of course there are better choices for English learners. Google did not include the example sentences from the COBUILD Wordbank, which means that all the other major dictionaries for advanced learners have more example sentences than the Google Dictionary — the best one in this respect (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) has more than twice as many examples, if you count those in the “extra examples” section.

The phonetic transcriptions have been copied from the COBUILD, so some of them are misleading. Some important phonetic information related to American English is missing. There are no audio recordings.

On the other hand, it’s hard to overlook the fact that you can now access Collins COBUILD’s friendly definitions and example sentences completely free of charge. You get reasonably good IPA transcriptions (in Unicode) that you can easily copy wherever you want. And, you avoid all the annoyances of recent software dictionaries: cluttered layout, slow scrolling, long startup time, poor mousewheel support, problems copying text to other applications. Google’s dictionary has a fast, minimalistic interface that Just Works. What more can you wish for?

It is not as comprehensive as dictionaries on DVD and its phonetics are not always trustworthy, but it is pleasant to use and has enough content to keep you busy for years. I suspect that few English learners will decide to spend money on a traditional dictionary when they can get 90% of what they need online for free. Is this the beginning of the end for dictionary publishers?

Review of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (17th edition):

the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary is useful in those situations where you have reasons to doubt your regular dictionary (or dictionaries). If the EPD lists a pronunciation first, it is probably the most common one. If the EPD does not list a pronunciation, it is probably quite rare.

Review of the CD-ROM version:

If you’re learning British pronunciation (RP), the exercises in the dictionary will help you learn the British sounds and their phonetic symbols. The dictionary will also give you easy access to British and American recordings and will let you practice imitating them with the voice recording feature.