> The additional burden of it using a separate regular alphabet is negligible in comparison.
While trying to learn Thai and Arabic at varying points years ago, I was frustrated to find that so many of the books out there ignore the native alphabet/script and instead rely on various romanization or transliteration schemes. In many cases I found these schemes, particularly the IPA [1], just as hard or harder to learn than the native script and pronunciation.
I understand that IPA has it's place, particularly in academic circles and/or if there is no native speaker around to model for proper pronunciation, but if you're giving me an audio CD too, what's the point of the intermediary?
It's true that learning IPA as well can be rather annoying and time-consuming.
However, it can be extremely valuable, because it distinguishes between every consonant and vowel sound that exists in the language. Many times, there are far more sounds than letters -- for example, English has five vowels but at least three times as many distinct vowel sounds. Plus, many times these distinctions don't even exist in your native language, and it is very hard to even realize they are there in recordings, because you're not used to listening for them.
Learning the IPA pronunciations forces you to become aware of every sound in the language, and distinguish between different sounds in different words that you might otherwise go for years without detecting. It's a high-investment, high-reward learning technique, and ideally used together with audio recordings.
While trying to learn Thai and Arabic at varying points years ago, I was frustrated to find that so many of the books out there ignore the native alphabet/script and instead rely on various romanization or transliteration schemes. In many cases I found these schemes, particularly the IPA [1], just as hard or harder to learn than the native script and pronunciation.
I understand that IPA has it's place, particularly in academic circles and/or if there is no native speaker around to model for proper pronunciation, but if you're giving me an audio CD too, what's the point of the intermediary?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa