MtheGM and Q, the background information about the schwa sound is interesting.

Eliza, I have often wished I could have studied linguistics.

As an elementary school teacher I became very familiar with the phonetic symbols used in dictionaries in the US, and I taught them to my students so that they could figure out how to say a new word. However, this was not the IPA, and there were at least two different phonetic alphabets. Which one was being used depended on which dictionary we looked at. Fortunately there was a lot of overlap between the two, and I made sure the children could understand the pronunciation key in case they looked in a dictionary that used the less familiar phonetic alphabet.