Pronunroid - IPA pronunciation

Hoardings Inc.

About this app

★★★★★

Pronunroid is an educational game that makes practicing English phonetics more fun!

It's aimed at practicing IPA (International Phonetics Alphabet) transcription of English words using General American accent. It has four main parts:

* Guess symbol: In this game, you are presented with three words that share a phonetic symbol which you have to guess.

* Guess pronunciation: In this game you are presented with a written word and you have to write the pronunciation for it in IPA.

* Guess spelling: In this game you are presented with the pronunciation of a word in IPA and you have to write the corresponding word. This, in addition to training your pronunciation skills, trains your spelling!

* Look up word: This function looks up the IPA pronunciation of a word.

Pronunroid is aimed at English as second language (ESL) learners. You can check out the symbols used at Wikitionary.

Right now, Pronunroid uses for the games the 2000 most common English words. However, you can try to look up the pronunciation of any word with the search feature. If Wordnik is aware of different pronunciations, you will get them all.

PERMISSIONS

The application requires access to Internet in order to download the pronunciations. It also sends anonymous statistics about its usage.

The external storage permission is needed for moving the app to the SD card.

Ratings and reviews

This app is great for TESTING yourself in various different ways, but it's not really designed to TEACH phonetics. Some pronunciations are fairly unpredictable, but that's mostly because English is wildy inconsistent. Overall, It's a great, free resource and definitely worth the download!

The guess the pronunciation mode would benefit from allowing multiple recognized answers. For example, the program insists on a /i/ sound in pretend but marks the equally common but more casual /ə/ as incorrect. Still fun, but the program should better reflect the way most native American English speakers pronounce words. Modern linguistics has done a lot to combat prescriptivist attitudes and it's frustrating to see this program advance those, even if by accident.

I like this app. I don't necessarily agree with every choice the creator has used, but I think overall it's very well done. I've never seen a source that puts the /'/ stress mark after the consonant but before the vowel in a syllable before. Also, the creator has standardized /ɛ/ as /e/, which I don't love, but I do understand. Maybe consider adding some lessons or a teaching mode?

What’s new

Fix examples for a phoneme