Thanks, Bean, for pointing out the IPA website. I can make good use of it. You are absolutely right that getting into the details of phonetics here would be a lost cause. IMHO that requires a classroom setting with lots of exposure to spoken sounds. Perhaps a good home program would be useful to really motivated people, but certainly not without soundtapes.

I worked for a number of years as a speech/language pathologist, and I discovered that even within the US there were so many variations in vowel sounds that moving from one part of the country to another required a whole new set of guidelines. I have often thought it would be enlightening to do some studying in another English-speaking country, the UK or Oz, say, and chart the rules for vowel production. For example, words that we USns (most of us anyway) pronounce with the short-a sound shift to more of an ah sound in the UK--but then not always. So knowing the symbols is only the first step.