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PerfectPronunciation

PerfectPronunciation is a Windows app for learning the basics of English pronunciation developed by Tom (the creator of Antimoon). It contains 500 exercises which teach you to pronounce the 500 most frequently used English words properly.

Benefits

When used regularly, Perfect­Pronunciation can help you:

• Speak English with more confidence. You won’t have to worry about how to say words like century and although. You will simply know how to pronounce them correctly.
• Start noticing other people’s mistakes in pronunciation (for example, in English classes).
• Learn the answers to many questions about English pronunciation, for example: How do I pronounce development? Is the oo in the words foot and food pronounced in the same way? Does law sound like low?
• Learn phonetic transcription — the system for writing down the pronunciations of English words used by teachers, pronunciation experts, and English dictionaries.
• Speak more clearly and be understood by others.
• Practice in your home as often as you want — without other people listening.

Features

• 500 exercises teach you to pronounce the most frequently used English words properly
• 564 high-quality audio recordings with clear American English pronunciation
• Clearly shows you all the sounds in a word through written pronunciations (phonetic transcriptions); information about word stress is also included. Phonetic transcriptions cover all the ways to pronounce a word, including British English pronunciation.
• Special notes explain various points related to pronunciation
• Helps you review what you have learned with advanced SuperMemo technology; keeps the pronunciations in your head
• Saves your time; “knows” which exercises you will soon forget and helps you review them — and doesn’t waste your time with exercises you remember well
• Includes a phonetic reference — a guide to all English sounds with over 100 recorded words

How an exercise works

PerfectPronunciation consists of 500 pronunciation exercises. Each exercise works like this:

1. First, PerfectPronunciation shows you an English word (for example, scheme).
2. You try to say the word properly.
3. You click a button and PerfectPronunciation plays a recording with the correct pronunciation. It also shows you the written pronunciation (phonetic transcription) of the word — so you can clearly see each sound in the word!
4. You compare your answer with the correct answer and you give yourself a grade between 0 (very bad) and 5 (very good). This grade is used by PerfectPronunciation to decide how well you remember the exercise (see below).

How reviews work

Many other English learning programs only teach you once, and then let you forget everything. PerfectPronunciation is different. It actually helps you keep your knowledge in your memory.

To do so, it uses SuperMemo technology (SuperMemo is short for Super Memory). The SuperMemo technology is the result of scientific research into human memory. It has won many awards and has been used for learning since the 1980s.

When you run PerfectPronunciation on a given day, it first gives you some “old” exercises to review — these are exercises that you have done before. The program asks you to review them so that you don’t forget them.

The interesting thing is that PerfectPronunciation chooses these “old” exercises in an intelligent way. Because you grade yourself at each exercise, PerfectPronunciation can look at your grades and calculate which exercises you will soon forget. It then asks you to review only these “poorly remembered” exercises. As a result, you never waste time on exercises you remember well. Instead of reviewing all the exercises, you only have to review a few exercises which are hard to remember.

It may sound simple, but PerfectPronunciation actually builds a complicated mathematical model of your memory and updates it with each exercise you do.

The two most important facts about the review system used in PerfectPronunciation are:

• Whenever you run PerfectPronunciation, it has some exercises for you — and those are the exercises which you need to review. In a way, PerfectPronunciation is like a good teacher who knows which exercises you should do.
• You can keep all the pronunciations in your memory, but you only have to spend a little time every day on reviews.

Get the app

PerfectPronunciation is free for noncommercial use. You are allowed to download it and use it, but you may not distribute it. I hope you will find it useful in your pronunciation study, but please note that I cannot offer support for it.

More information

• Example screenshots from PerfectPronunciation
• User guide for PerfectPronunciation