International Journal of Education

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) leads to the separation between pronunciation and spelling of the most majority of English words and requires a double memorizing burden of English learners, i.e., that s/he should learn two alphabets, IPA for pronunciation and the regular one for reading. In order to solve the main problem a new English phonetic notation system has been newly developed by means of the almost perfect combination or blending between English letters and the five pronunciation informative marks or diacritics added to English letters to indicate the pronunciation information of English words and so on, which system is referred to as Jiugong Phonetic Alphabet (JPA for short) that is different to IPA. The five markings or diacritics to guide learners to the correct English pronunciation and to read words readily comprise single-dotted and double-dotted marks, short-horizontal and long-horizontal marks and colorful marks and are summed up as dotted-horizontal-colorful marks, one of the former two is placed over or under a letter to show that the letter should be pronounced differently from the same letter without any mark, which markers to designate sounds are indicators of letter-sound correspondences. Because of its various functions and characteristics, JPA that can unify the pronunciation and spelling of words would surely be a beneficial complement or partial replacement to IPA and a very powerful assistant for quickly memorizing the sounds and the spelling of English words in particular.

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA); Jiugong Phonetic Alphabet (JPA); The pronunciation informative marks; Diacritics; Simple Phonetic Alphabet; Jiugong English (Jiuglish)