this small 3-part video series is a good place to start:

part 1: https://youtu.be/xMEFr7ghMTg?si=08I3vCSiwQC4Iuve part 2: https://youtu.be/J3IO5K5ZGB4?si=u2SaJx6gv45tsI1V part 3: https://youtu.be/jkfSA4_DCfs?si=JlMkiv75njWzbG5k

then you can just look at transcriptions in a language you speak, and/or look at the chart and try to pronounce some of the sounds (good luck for that one lmao). a good place to look/ask is r/asklinguistics, r/linguistics, r/conlangs on reddit, they’re pretty active

one thing i should clarify now is the convention you usually see for notation using the IPA – there’s a difference between /broad/ transcription and [narrow] transcription.

you see, the IPA can be used in many different ways – it can be used phonemically, or phonetically, or sometimes in other ways.

Phonetically means the symbols represent phones. Phones are distinct sounds, they are a specific way of articulating/pronouncing/using your articulators (articulators being the things you use to pronounce stuff, e.g. your tongue or lips or vocal cords). Usually you will represent more phonetic transcription using brackets [ ] (narrow transcription).

Phonemically means the symbols represent phonemes. Usually more phonemic transcriptions are represented with slashes / / (broad transcription). Phonemes are sounds that carry meaning in a language – i.e., a phoneme is something that if you replace with another phoneme, speakers perceive that as a different word. A phoneme is generally made up of multiple phones, called allophones, all of which are different phonetically but the speaker of the language perceives them as the same thing – in fact the thing I described in this thread is a great example of that!

“Dragon” in English is made up of six phonemes, /ˈdræ.gən/ – /d/ the “d” sound in English, /r/ (also written /ɹ/) the “r” sound in English, /æ/ the “a” sound in “cat” or “ask” in English, /g/ the “g” sound, /ə/ the schwa sound/reduced vowel as in the “a” in “about” or the “u” in “medium”, /n/ the “n” sound. /ˈ/ means the following syllable has primary stress (in English that would usually mean pronouncing it with fortis – louder/more tense, and with a higher pitch than the rest of the syllables). /./ is a syllable boundary, it demarcates the end of the previous syllable and the beginning of the next syllable. /ˌ/ would be secondary stress. Often times the primary stress symbol is omitted if it’s in the first syllable.

When you write /dræ.gən/, that’s kind of a “template” made of phonemes that are good for describing a wide variety of dialects’ sounds – it’d be very cumbersome to try to write an extremely narrow, phonetic transcription of dozens of dialects’ pronunciations every time you want to describe a word; using broad transcription, you can then leave it to the reader to further break it down into more specific, precise transcriptions whenever they care about a specific dialect.

So let’s break it down – in my dialect, /r/ is pronounced as a post-alevolar approximant – that is, pronouncing with a continuous flow of air with the tongue behind the alveolar ridge (the bump on the roof of your mouth behind your teeth) and not touching the roof of the mouth as to not cause as much obstruction. This would be transcribed as [ɹ̠] or [ɹ˗], the symbol for the alveolar approximant plus the diacritic for retraction (pronouncing further behind in the mouth). A lot of the times, the /r/ sound in a lot of dialects may be transcribed as [ɻ] – retroflex, generally meaning post-alveolar/pre-palatal with a tongue curled upwards, or even [ɹ̈] which uses the “centralized” diacritic to represent “bunched r” which is post-alveolar/pre-palatal and has the sides of the tongue spread out towards the molars and a strange-looking orientation/curl of the tongue called “bunching” (a sound found in very few languages, I believe only English and Dutch, and which is the realization in my dialect). You can use more symbols to be even more precise, e.g. add [ʷ] (labialized) or [ᶹ] (labiovelarized) since English /ɹ/ is often pronounced with labial constriction (constriction/tenseness using both lips) or labiovelar constriction (using the bottom lip and upper teeth).

So right off the bat, you can change it to [dɹ̠æ.ɡən]. The /d/ forms a consonant cluster with the /r/, which means it’s pronounced with no vowels or pauses in between them – since the [ɹ̠] is post-alveolar, it influences consonants in the proximity which have a nearby/relatively close place of articulation to shift towards / assimilate to its place of articulation. In a lot of dialects, this causes /dɹ̠/ to simply become [d̠ɹ̠], with both of them being post-alveolar. But in my speech, it goes even further and the /d/ affricates into [d̠͡ʒ] called the voiced post-alveolar affricate which is the “j” sound. Often a change like this is called “palatalization” because the consonant shifts towards a palatal pronunciation (palatal referring to the hard palate, the place of articulation of /j/ the palatal approximant which is the “y” sound in English), in this case becoming pre-palatal [dʒ]. But you shan’t confuse this with the other use of “palatalized/palatalization”, which is when a sound is pronounced with partial constriction at the (hard) palate, often transcribed with superscript /ʲ/ following the consonant (e.g. /kʲ/), although often times a palatalized consonant does shift towards a palatal pronunciation.

So then we have [d̠͡ʒɹ̠æ.ɡən]. Lastly, in my dialect /ə/ in certain contexts behind consonants often becomes [ɪ] – a near-close near-front vowel, similar to the “i” in “bit” or “industry” – or [ɪ̈] sometimes called “schwi” which is similar but more centralized.

So finally we have [d̠͡ʒɹ̠æ.ɡɪ̈n] or even more specifically [ˈd̠͡ʒɹ̠ᶹæ.ɡɪ̈n]. That would be an accurate way to phonetically transcribe how I say “dragon”.

Some speakers may take reducing the /ə/ even further and delete it entirely, instead pronouncing the last syllable as [gn̩] – the line under the “n” meaning it’s syllabic, which means that it’s the nucleus of the syllable (the nucleus being the center of/only necessary part of the syllable, where a vowel would usually be), pronouncing the second syllable with no vowel. Then, you might see even more change with speakers assimilating the “n” to the place of articulation of the “g”, making it a velar (pronounced at the velum, also called the soft palate) nasal, which would make the last syllable [gŋ̍].

And you would perceive all this as the word “dragon”, even if you pronounce it differently than I do. That’s the beauty of language. You might use different phones in the same context as me, but at the end of the day they’re the allophones of the same phonemes.

Now you may ask, how the hell do linguists type this stuff conveniently? The answer is, they don’t, it can be a pain in the ass to find a tool to conveniently type for linguistics because there’s just so many symbols, often times you use something like an online IPA typing tool or google gboard on android.

But it was. And educated you as well. Win-win.