Lay people are convinced that the pronunciation of a language and its offcial spelling are one and the same thing (in spite of some lamented incongruity). This impression derives from the fact that school –to be true– generally only worries about writing, and completely neglects and ignores pronunciation. Society does no better on the whole! ˛us, people are irrationally terrified by spelling er rors, to which they will be passively subjected without asking themselves any questions.

˛e belief of the (almost) çnaturalÇ correspondence between spelling and pro nunciation is merely illusory. But, if spelling can be fairly homogeneous in everynation (at least as far as middle and upper education levels are concerned), this in stead is not the case for pronunciation, which is generally more or less regionally marked.

be applied in many useful ways. Equally, if we learn to use the categories and principles of phonetics, we can succeed –with spontaneous naturalness– in recognizing the di‡erent sounds of our own language, including nuances. Later on, we can also manage to recognize the sounds of other languages, dialects, and accents. And this will become easier if we are able to apply correctly what phonetics o‡ers freely, with no need of expensive equipments, and with no particular talent: it is su‚cient (but necessary) to start to really çlistenÇ to the sounds, it is not enough to simply çhearÇ them.