How many of you know that when you buy a DICTIONARY (yes, the one in book form), YOU ALSO PAY for the DICTIONARY to TELL YOU the PRONUNCIATION of EVERY SINGLE WORD listed in it?

The page shown below was taken from the "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (International Student's Edition) - 8th Edition". There is a string of SYMBOLS in a pair of slashes after each word. (I've highlighted them in red boxes for you!) For example, let's look at the first word which is "aghast". Now, do you see /əˈɡɑːst/ next to the word? That's the PRONUNCIATION of the word "aghast". It's called the pronunciation spelling or phonetic spelling. 
English is a non-phonetic language. Thus, it's not easy to tell the pronunciation of a word simply by looking at the spelling of the word. Similarly, it's not easy to write down a word (or spell it) when we hear the word, especially a new one that we have neither seen nor heard before. Thus, we should have known the pronunciation of the word earlier in order to pronounce it at any time later. This is how exactly we learned to pronounce the English words - we heard from someone for the first time. It could be your teacher, a person you were talking to or while listening to news, watching videos, etc. In short, someone has to "teach" us directly or indirectly how to pronounce a word. Unfortunately, we cannot depend on those people to tell us the pronunciation of words at any time we want or needed. The ONLY PERSON who can come to your rescue at anytime (day or night) and anywhere is your DICTIONARY. Yes, if you know how to read the PRONUNCIATION SPELLINGS printed in the dictionary, you can easily tell the pronunciation of ANY WORD whose pronunciation is not known to you.

You may ask "Who can teach me how to read the pronunciation spellings?". Guess what! I CAN HELP YOU. Talk to me on Skype. This is my Skype ID live:gabrielsowrian

Note: Every now and then, I'll post words where it's even hard to guess their pronunciations. This is merely to raise awarness among our club members the importance of knowing how to read the phonetic spellings and that it's the ONLY SOLUTION for all our PRONUNCIATION PROBLEMS.