American English Pronunciation app
The story behind the app
I’m an educator and an app developer. Educator first, app developer second. This is the story of how the ae Pronunciation app came into being.
Technology can’t replace teachers, but it can greatly help them.
Background
Back in 2012 I had been teaching English in China for a number of years, but I found that my students often struggled with the same English sounds: the th of thanks, the s of usually, the l of school, and so on. I could help them somewhat in class, but I realized my time with each of them was very limited. I wanted to give them a tool that they could use outside of class to build their pronunciation skills. That’s when I decided to make an app.
Chinese students mainly learned British English from their textbooks, which included the phonetic symbols to write the pronunciation:
This was a good start, but the problem was I was American, not British. The sounds used in the two dialects are similar but not exactly the same. Another confusion was that some of the symbols in that chart differed from the more…
