I was helping a friend of mine study English today. English teaching in China seems to pretty much universally use the IPA for pronunciation. Which, honestly, why don’t we do that when teaching foreign languages? I speak passable Mandarin with (just saying) a remarkably good accent, and my accent has been about the same since my Mandarin was a lot less than passable. If it wasn’t for Phonology101*, though, I’d probably still be trying to figure out whether Pinyin ‘x’ was a ‘sh’ sound or a ‘s’ sound (it’s an alveo-palatal fricative!).

*Actually LING1005 at UQ, but that’s less iconic.