Vowel Analysis (heed, hid, head, had, etc)

This assignment was really interesting! When I recorded the words, I could hardly see some of the words - especially "who'd". As I started measuring, or rather writing the measurements Praat gave me, I noticed that they were way off from the author's measurements, which meant that my graph looks really weird. I don't know if it is simply demonstrating the difference between British English and American English, or I did not record/interpret the spectogram well. My graph does have the general shape as the author's but is shifted down and my [æ] and [ε] were reversed. I noticed that this is very different from the vowel chart on the "pocket-sized" IPA card, where [æ] and [ε] are very close. Also, on my graph [i] and [u] are close; they are both on the left side of my graph. I am guessing that I probably did something drastically wrong when recording my data from the spectogram. Nonetheless, this was a fun exercise

The second chapter of the reading was very interesting as well. I enjoyed reading about the different vowels of each language and trying (and failing) to imitate the vowels of Japanese and Danish.