Omniglot

The title of this post links to a very thorough website on writing systems. For linguists and others casually interested in language, it's worth a read-through.

I used to be able to transcribe IPA with reasonable accuracy, although I've pretty much lost the nuances. The one linguistics class I took (senior year of college, spring semester) explained so much to me that I wished I had taken it much earlier. Beyond cleaning up my pronunciation in French, it made me more aware of how sounds and words are formed, and how grammatical structures link together words according to a set of complex rules. If ever I were to pursue a doctorate (hah!), it would probably be in linguistics and second-language acquisition. Here's to dreaming!