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IPA is really tricky to read, especially for beginners like me.
Are there any online tools that can almost 'convert' pasted IPA into phonetic pronunciations or similar?
I've tried Wolfram|Alpha which doesn't seem to understand IPA, and a Google search wasn't much help.
Any advice? Thanks.
I haven't heard of the kind of program that you've described, but it might not matter, because there is no substitute for learning the IPA. You may find the following links to be helpful:
First, here are some links that have sound files to go with the IPA characters so that you can hear how they're pronounced.
Consonants: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/consonants.html
Non-Pulmonic Consonants: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/nonpulmonics.html
Vowels: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/vowels.html
Diphthongs: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/diphthongs.html
Diacritics: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/diacritics.html
Other Symbols: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/othersymbols.html
Suprasegmentals: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/suprasegmentals.html
Second, there is at least one way of transcribing the IPA with ASCII characters, to wit:
http://www.let.rug.nl/~gilbers/onderwijs/tools/sampa.html
Third, here is an online IPA keyboard.
This is only half an answer, unfortunately (I came here looking for the same thing!) — but I'd like to point out that the technical term for what you're looking for, is a non-phonemic pronunciation respelling.
Part of what you need exists already — that is, a thorough mapping of “IPA” to “truh-DISH-shən-uhl” does exist, here, on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Pronunciation_respelling_key
I hope that helps somebody in building towards a “quick IPA translator for English speakers!”
Preface: I don't know of an online tool for this, and I agree that the real solution is to practice IPA.
That said, there are a number of alternative phonetic alphabets (as James Grossman mentioned, though SAMPA is probably worse than IPA). Some of them might be easier to read: ARPAbet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpabet) is relatively approachable, for example. However, it still requires some learning to be able to read quickly.
You'd also need either a dictionary containing both transcriptions to search for words in (extant words only), or an IPA-to-ARPAbet converter; the latter is actually nontrivial because the phones in an IPA string aren't necessarily delimited, there's not an exact correspondence between most phonetic alphabets, and IPA may be used for either phonemic or phonetic transcriptions.
Googling, I found this Praat script which appears to contain an IPA-to-ARPAbet conversion function (http://students.washington.edu/riebold/files/Arpabet%20Vowel%20Analyzer.praat); and this Haskell file which seems to contain ARPAbet-to-IPA (http://rd.slavepianos.org/sw/sw-83/Sound/SC3/Lang/Data/CMUdict.hs).
