Hear the difference.
Play or pray? Light or right? When your first language treats two English sounds as one, you can train your ear to hear them apart. TellApart does it in a few minutes a day.
Real clips from the app. Turn your sound on.
Your ear isn't broken. It's tuned to your first language.
Every language sorts sounds into its own groups. Japanese has one sound where English has R and L, so "play" and "pray" can sound like the same word. That's a listening habit, and habits can be retrained.
One word. Two choices. That's the whole app.
Listen
One word plays, spoken by one of many native voices: American, British and Australian, young and old.
Choose
Tap the word you heard: play or pray. The right word lights up for a moment, then the next one plays.
Level up
Score 17/20 and the next level opens: start of the word, then clusters, then middle and end. New voices every time.
Built on high variability phonetic training.
HVPT has learners pick between two words, spoken by many different talkers. Studies with Japanese learners of English found better R/L identification after training, gains that lasted months later, and some carry-over to pronunciation.
- Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: A first reportLogan, Lively & Pisoni · JASA · 1991
- Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. III. Long-term retentionLively, Pisoni, Yamada et al. · JASA · 1994
- … IV. Some effects of perceptual learning on speech productionBradlow, Pisoni, Akahane-Yamada & Tohkura · JASA · 1997
- High Variability [Pronunciation] Training (HVPT): A proven techniqueThomson · Journal of Second Language Pronunciation · 2018
17 collections. Each one is two sounds and many words.
L vs R alone has 42 word pairs across three levels, from light · right to collect · correct.
Consonants
Vowels
Be first to hear the difference.
TellApart is coming to the App Store and Google Play.