Resumen
Many of you holding this book may not need to be convinced of the importance and usefulness of phonemic transcription in language learning. If you happen to be among the happy uninitiated or are just reluctant to deal formally with pronunciation, I would simply say that transcription is to a language learner what musical notation is to a musician. For all its limitations, it is the best tool we have to show to the eye what is addressed to the ear alone, thereby enabling us to separate our perception of sounds from their orthographic representation. Granted, in the same way that a score tells you nothing about how to play an instrument, a transcription in itself cannot teach you to articulate a sound or, for that matter, to acquire new habit patterns for speaking. That is in fact the business of educational phonetics, not the real purpose of phonemic transcription. What a transcription can do is to serve as a visual tool to raise awareness of pronunciation, whether it be to improve your own performance or for teaching purposes.<
