Comment

Comment by throwaway89201

This website seems almost dangerously wrong. It uses only a single phoneme / sound for single letters, regardless of the actual phoneme used in the word. For example, every 'a' in a word is the /æ/ phoneme (as in "cat"), but this same sound is used for the word "a", which should be pronounced as /ə/ or /eɪ/ (as in "about" or "cake").

It also seems to mix up American and British English pronunciation between the phoneme and word forms a lot, for example in the word "class" which uses American phonemes but uses the British word pronunciation.

It sometimes cheats by declaring a word 'difficult'. For example word "no" is declared difficult, which the average learner is probably pretty practiced in saying. It's just not using the same phoneme as the all the other 'o' phonemes on the website.

I'm sure its made with best intentions, but the foundation on which the app is built / prompted is incorrect. Please don't use this to teach children. Use proper material made by educators, acclaimed authors and experts.

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton