Phonetix
| Category | Price | Seller | Device |
|---|---|---|---|
| Education | Free | Christian Bonnin | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
Its phonetic notation is used mostly by foreign language students and teachers but also linguists, speech therapists, singers, actors, lexicographers, conlangers and translators.
This App shows you for free the 106 letters of the alphabet (plus 3 nasal vowels used in French) with the name of the way they are pronounced. The language of the examples can be changed (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German).
The payable extension allows you to play the sounds.
The symbols are the property of the International Phonetic Association.
Reviews
I was ripped off
Annî
I wasted 99¢ on this app. They said that I needed to purchase the application in order to hear the sounds. I did and It doesn’t play the sounds.
Some sounds are wrong
Tonya Kaushik
Just upgraded. Symbols are accurate, but instead of saying the words that match the sounds, it says crazy things that are not words in English. For [w], e.g., it says, "Wah, uhwaaah." What the heck? And it has bed and met as sample words but it says [aj] rather than the short e sound. I recommend just getting the free version until this is fixed if you plan on using this for TESOL. It may be fine for the other languages it supports, but it isn't 100% accurate for English.
Theoretically great
DarinIsAwesome
I upgraded so that I could hear the symbols pronounced, and it worked once, but every time I try to play the sounds now, nothing happens. I even redownloaded the app, to no avail. The sounds made that I tested initially after the in-app upgrade sounded fine. They're phonetic pronunciations of each symbol, not pronunciations of each sample word. This part of the app worked great once, but hasn't since.
Good little IPA app ...
LMountford
For what it is, this is a nice app. I went ahead and sprang for the extension so I could access the IPA symbols for other languages. I wasn't so interested in the pronunciation since the beauty of the IPA is that a given symbol SOUNDS the same no matter what language, but the free app doesn't allow you to SEE the symbols for other languages unless you pay for the extension. It's only $.99, though, so not too bad. So far so good. It's behaving well, and I'm using it right now to work on some Spanish choral music. The pronunciation seems spot on, too. Good investment!
Not to be trusted
heavycrag
The symbol that looks like an upside down lowercase "e" has an incorrect audio demo. If I hadn't looked it up on wikipedia I wouldn't have known and I would have learned it incorrectly. Now I wonder how many other symbols are wrong! If an educational tool for something limited in scale like this isn't 100% accurate then it is not worth purchasing.
At least one error.
Retail slave
For the English phonemes: there should not be an alveolar trill, as trills do not exist in English. The /r/ phoneme in English is usually best described as a voiced alveolar approximant, often with rounding of the lips. Other than that, a nice ap for the price.
Useable
helloIdon'twanttoshowmyname
I am happy with this app, because it allows me to view the entire IPA unhindered. It provides a complete list, arranged in traditional order. For a price, it also offers pronunciations, which I deem accurate enough based on my ability to reproduce them. Two things that I would be grateful for are grids for the phonemes, and the ability to copy any given character to my clipboard. Otherwise, this app serves my purposes just fine. (To the fellow who, for want of a nicer word, complained about the alveolar trill: yes, it is inaccurate as such (as well as [u], and [l]), but English <r> is nearly always represented with /r/. It is meant as reference for looking up IPA representations of that language, which will have /r/, and it would be confusing for the app not to have an English pronunciation for that character, and instead relocate it to the retroflex approximant. Therefore, it is prudent to instead have it at /r/.)
good budget educational app
pdRydia
Not a bad study aid for learning the IPA, especially at $1. I especially like the ability to pull up Spanish language examples, since I study that language. It's absolutely impossible to learn these symbols with nothing but a book for reference, especially if you have a speech impediment or if your native dialect is anything other than Standard American English. Both are true in my case, so the "example words" given by books tend to be of varying value. I would give this 5 stars, but if you lose your data without a backup, you also lose your purchased upgrade. Honestly, that's a bit too sloppy. There needs to be an option to restore previous purchases, or simple a separate "paid" app.
