This may not work for everyone, but I tend to be systematic about this, so this is how I learned the IPA (and in the process became really good at pronunciation even when I know nothing about the language).
Learn the terminology. Learn what “alveolar” means, for instance, and “velar,” “plosive,” “fricative,” “approximant,” “sibilant,” “voiced,” “voiceless,” “pulmonic,” “ingressive,” “nasal(ized),” “open,” “close,” etc. Start here, and look over the charts at the bottom of the page (click “show” by “Consonants” and “Vowels”).
Correlate all these new terms with how they feel in your mouth. Start with, say, the voiceless bilabial plosive /p/, then change one parameter as a time while keeping the others the same. Change the plosive to a nasal, then to a fricative. Then go back to plosives, but change the place of articulation to labiodental. Consonants are probably easier to do this with since they tend to be more discrete than vowels, but eventually you should correlate broad parameter combinations (such as place+manner+voicing for consonants or closeness+fronting+roundness for vowels) with a specific sound, and therefore the symbols for each.
Add secondary features, such as palatalization or glottalization (all the things written in super- or subscript). Feel the difference between a plain consonant, a palatalized one, a glottalized one, etc., or between a plain vowel, a nasal vowel, or a breathy voiced one. Memorize the correlations between the super/subscript symbols and the sound differences.
Practice transcribing words, in your native language and others, into the IPA, in languages which have regular orthographies, practice transcribing written words into the IPA. Languages like Spanish or Italian are good choices for this since there is often an exact correlation between letters and IPA symbols. (That is, Italian and Spanish <a>, <o>, <m>, <n>, <p>, etc. make the sounds represented by IPA /a/, /o/, /m/, /n/, /p/, etc.)
Keep practicing. That’s it. I used to get bored in math class so I’d transcribe key terms in my notes into the IPA. I’d make up a language sound system, then transcribe names into the IPA and then sort out the closest equivalents in the constructed phonology. As a result, I can pronounce “eichhörnchen.”
Note that you can use the IPA to be as detailed as you want, to write down exact spoken forms or underlying forms. For instance, the underlying phonetic form /sændwɪtʃ/ (”sandwich”) is often rendered as [sæ̃wɪt̬ʃ̬] in quickly-spoken American English, so to say that you’re writing a “word” in the IPA is a slightly shaky proposition.
pixelskylines
stormborns
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
2087
blakekathryn
