Phonetic writing is helpful because orthographic writing is often ambiguous or unclear. There is also an Americanist tradition in phonetics that has slightly different symbols for certain speech sounds. Length Length is a phonetic feature that affects vowels and consonants within a syllable. In Finnish there are long and short vowels and consonants. Intonation Intonation is a phonetic feature involving changes of pitch over a phrase or sentence.
Intonation normally adds emotional rather than lexical meaning.
Tone or pitch Tone refers to changes in pitch at a syllable or word level. Stress Stress is a combination of several phonetic features that may include increased volume, higher pitch and longer length depending on the particular language. They're in imports. They import silk. It can help you improve your pronunciation in a foreign language.