Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects about learning a new language is its phonetics. The fact is that there are significant phonetic differences between two languages or even between two variants of the same language. Besides, the traditional alphabets fail to represent all the real sounds in a language. The International Phonetic Alphabet is an attempt to create an alphabet that allows representing sounds from any human oral language, paying special attention to the one-two-one correspondence between each symbol and the sound it stands for.
Unlike many other languages that benefit from many pronunciation rules with only a few exceptions, the English language grapheme-phoneme correspondence is short of rules and abundant in exceptions, which usually shock learners of this major language. And this is when knowing the International Phonetic Alphabet may come in handy.
Phonetizer is intended to transcribe English texts into the International Phonetic Alphabet. So if you are a language learner, a linguist, a language teacher or a lexicographer, you will probably appreciate the help of this tool to help you pronounce words correctly.
The interface is very easy to use. It is composed of two panels: the first is for you to enter the text and the second is where you will get the transcribed version. The transcription results can be set to appear in either of the two most important English variants: British or American. In addition, you can also have a transliteration in Cyrillic characters. The software also uses your system’s speech engine to read selected words or phrases.
Phonetizer is definitely a useful application. Nevertheless, for understandable reasons, it is incapable of dealing with non-significant pronouncing variants of the same word, a common phenomenon in English.
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