Which only shows the impovershment of using sample words to indicate pronunciation.

I'd thought about politely asking NicholasW to do an IPA (= International Phonetic Alphabet) tutorial for us but I've concluded it's waaaaay too complicated to do without sound, and the symbols are weird and probably hard to produce without some effort.

I found a good website with clickable sounds, though: http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/ It was after reading through this page that I realized that trying to get everyone here to learn the IPA would be futile. I for one don't really have the time, even when restricted to the subset of symbols used in English. (I have pored over the relevant section in my linguistics book to no avail; since I never actually took this course but got the book from my brother, I've had no cause to actually memorize the symbols.)