As I wrote previously, almost half of our visitors don’t know International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols.
We were thinking about how to improve the user experience for everyone, independent on whether the person knows IPA phonetic symbols or doesn’t.
Finally, we came up with this idea that the user decides himself what he wants to see when he clicks the word.
We know that a lot of our users use the phonetic converters as language learning tools. And quite often people need to find the meaning or the translation of a word in their native language. So we also added links to popular online dictionaries. We tried to include mostly the dictionaries that have audio recordings of the wrods.
Now, for example, in our English phonetic translator when you click the word, you can see the following:
- short phonetic symbols cheat sheet (only with the symbols found in the word)
- link to audio/video recordings from our database
- links to online dictionaries (Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, Longman, Collins and others)
- link to search YouTube videos
- word’s meaning from the integrated English dictionary WordNet
We also created an algorithm that allows you to create custom word lists and export them into different formats: Word, Excel or Anki.
These word lists are securely stored in your profile and you can access them anytime in the future.