"mature"

I pronounce this as [m@tur\] "muh toor". How do you pronounce it?

I'm from California and [m@"tS3`]

I pronounce it variably as [m@"tS_hU@`] or [m@"tS_h3`].

I pronounce it as [m@"?tS_j_hR=:] or sometimes, more carefully, as [m@"tS_j_h}_^u:R].

How long does it take you to pronounce those long transcriptions?

Not very long; it's more a matter of being aware of what is really being articulated more than anything else.

M'choor.

You obviously drop the yod.

I don't understand Travis' system here. If you can't think of a good phonetic way of explaining it, could you not use IPA? Being new to the forum of course I may have have missed years of threads saying how horrid the IPA is.......

Ah, thank you. Could end-users tell me how this improves upon IPA? It seems much longer.

<<Could end-users tell me how this improves upon IPA? It seems much longer.>>

Travis just uses lots of detail in his phonetic transcriptions.

He must speak much slower than I do:)

I think one symbol per phoneme will do me.

But I always try to describe things using rhymes and phonics if I possibly can, so you don't need to know any symbol system.

Thanks for that Josh, but I'd only use it if I absolutely had to. I'm so used to IPA I don't have to look anything up, provided we are talking about Engish. I really don't want to have to memorize another system at this stage in the game.

I hope students don't end up in the middle of all this.
Doesn't the fact that pronunciation is so variable mean that learning one person's pronunciation of a single word becomes rather irrelevant to learners when they find themselves among people whose pronunciation slightly differs?

Mind you that at least some of us here are interested in English linguistics and not in the teaching of English as a second language. And also mind you that it is quite clear that the pronunciations given here are those of particular individuals (and their dialects), and are in no fashion supposed to be standardized examples of English pronunciation. Furthermore, I do not expect second language speakers of English to pick up all their English pronunciation from just some isolated examples here; for instance, I doubt that anyone is going to end up sounding like they speak a progressive form of the dialect on the west side of Milwaukee just from reading my transcriptions of my own speech here.