Locate native speakers of other languages in your community who will serve as your informants, or sources, as you learn. You may find informants through social clubs or social networking, local school groups, business associates, or friends. Contact these informants and arrange to record utterances that contain phonemes, or sound units, distinctive to their languages. Take full notes on each subject's age, background and linguistic influences. Write down a translation of the each informant's utterances.
Use your Web browser to load IPA sound sources provided by individuals and linguistic organizations who make these resources available for students and other individuals who want to associate phonemes with their appropriate transcriptions. Repeat the phonemes until you are confident in your ability to recognize and reproduce them. Practice transcribing them.
Ask a friend or relative to read a sample text aloud so you can practice transcribing. Write out a text that includes phonemes with obvious dialect variations, such as digraphs -- combinations of consonantal sounds -- and complex words that native speakers of English "simplify" when they pronounce them, such as "government" or "mountain."
Borrow foreign-language films from your public or university library. Play the movies on your VCR, DVD or Blu-ray player, or computer optical drive. Transcribe the dialog while the movie plays. After you have transcribed significant sections of spoken language, read your transcriptions aloud as the movie plays and compare what you wrote to what the actors say.
Listen to a TV or radio newscast and transcribe what you hear. See how quickly you can work when the source is a native speaker of your own language who's talking at a normal conversational pace.