Blog about Pronunciation and Phonetic Transcription

We have great news for people who learn Spanish. Miguel Lescano authorized us to use his Spanish word frequency list SpanishInput on EasyPronunciation.com. It’s available in:

On Saturday we released several updates. Here’s the summary:

Up until now the only way how unstressed retroflex schwa sound could be displayed in our English phonetic translator was /ɚ/. In Unicode this symbol is called “schwa with hook”. For stressed retroflex sound there were two options: One of our users mentioned that the official IPA versions with diacritic /ɜ˞/ and /ə˞/ were missing… Continue reading Stressed and unstressed retroflex schwa sound in American English

I love learning foreign languages. There are so many beautiful and exciting things going on while you learn to speak and understand a language that is not your mother tongue. We all know that it takes time to really master a language. In this short post, I want to discuss a little bit how you… Continue reading Learn a language and stay healthy

Recently I discovered a very interesting youtuber and phonetician Dr. Geoff Lindsey. If you are interested in English phonetics, I highly recommend subscribing to his channel. In his video “Schwa is never stressed” – FALSE he talks about the schwa /ə/ sound. His suggests that in American English it should be the only phoneme for… Continue reading Stressed schwa sound in American English

Last month, we created detailed tutorials that explain how to use our IPA phonetic translators. Each phonetic translator on our website is unique. So the tutorial for our English phonetic translator is obviously different from the tutorial for our Japanese phonetic translator. Most of the tutorials include the following sections:

We are excited to announce that we just released the option that allows to edit transcription of the words. Right now it is only available in our English phonetic translator. The option allows you to do two things: In the latter case, you will need to go to your account, click on “Customize my experience”… Continue reading Edit transcription option arrives on EasyPronunciation.com for now in beta

If you learn Chinese, you may have noticed how imperfect pinyin is as phonetic transcription system. Take the syllables “qiu” and “you”, for example. The final in both syllables is exactly the same, it is pronounced the same, but they are written differently. The same thing goes for the syllables like “wei” and “dui”. Or… Continue reading International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription for Chinese

We are happy to announce that we just released our updated database with pronunciations of words in British English. This is our biggest update for British English ever. The new database supports more than 130,000 unique English words. The pronunciation of each word was proofread manually! At the same time we updated the general algorithm… Continue reading More than 130,000 words in our database for British English

There’s an update in our English phonetic converter. Now for American English dialect we added an option to display transcription according to The American Heritage Dictionary phonetic spelling system. You can check the list of pronunciation symbols used in The American Heritage Dictionary here. The transcription obtained with our converter sometimes may be a bit… Continue reading The American Heritage Dictionary phonetic spelling system