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As Draconis said, the answer to this question depends on the language. The basic method is to look what consonant sequences can occur at the start of words in the language. For example, the word fleec …

English /b p/ aren't very different from Mandarin Chinese /p pʰ/, respectively, and it's certainly wrong to say that Pinyin "b" is supposed to be more like English "p". Sometimes people will say Manda …

In the first edition of his Outline of English Phonetics in 1918 Jones himself remarked that ''the custom of regarding certain vowels as long and certain others as short is, to say the least of it, unsatisfactory … It is much to be desired that all writers on English phonetics should come to an agreement to adopt a system of transcription for English independent of length marks''. …

You'll only get a phonemic transcription like /ˈmũ.du/ in a language that can be analyzed as having nasal vowel phonemes. This is arguably the case for Portuguese, whereas I don't think anyone has eve …

If we use standard German spelling as a reference point, probably there simply never was a time when all words currently spelled with ⟨ä⟩ had one vowel sound and all words currently spelled with ⟨e⟩ h …

French In French, there is not actually neutralization between vowel pairs like /ɛ̃/ and /ɛ/ before a nasal consonant: the pronunciation of tînmes /tɛ̃m/ is clearly distinct from that of thèmes /tɛm/ …

Voice onset time is a convenient measurement that can be used to compare aspirated, tenuis, and voiced stops to each other, since across different languages (or across different contexts within a lang …

Per the official IPA definitions, ɕ and ʑ stand for alveolo-palatal fricatives, and sʲ and zʲ stand for palatalized alveolar fricatives. The official definitions are vague and so do not fully specify …

French has “ouaip” (vs. neutral-register “oui”) for “yes”. I don’t know how often it is used. My impression is that French word final consonants are released more often than English ones.

On an empirical level, phonemic voicing of word-final obstruent consonants appears to exist in some languages (in Sanskrit and in varieties of Polish spoken in some regions such as Poznań-Kraków; for …

English speakers have used ⟨zh⟩ for [ʒ] since the 17th century The first examples I know of ⟨zh⟩ for [ʒ] occur in 17th century authors writing in English about pronunciation and phonetics. …

The same page has a list of final consonant clusters further down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Coda However, medial clusters are a third situation, in the sense that the medial clu …

"The phonetics of schwa vowels" by Edward Flemming has some examples. …

I don't have an explanation from a synchronic phonetic perspective. From a diachronic and phonological perspective, /v/ in many languages, including Danish and Russian, developed from earlier /w/. Thi …

The layout of an IPA chart is partly arbitrary, by which I mean that there are patterns to it, but those patterns aren't necessary the only patterns that would have been reasonable. They just are what …