The ground floor

From a letter to a sentence.

You know every word in this sentence. Play it at normal speed and you will not catch it — and that has nothing to do with your vocabulary.

What is writtenWhat are you doing?
What arriveswhatchadoin

Four words you have known for years, and not one of them survives intact. This is not slang and it is not fast speech — it is ordinary English, and it is what a lecture sounds like.

People will tell you there are hundreds of pronunciation rules. There are not. There is one law and a pile of consequences: English runs on a beat. Words that carry meaning land on it and stay loud. Everything else falls between beats and gets crushed toward the same small, flat sound.

wanna, gonna, fish n chips, and the reason you have never been sure whether someone said can or can't — all of it falls out of that one fact.

13machines, letters through sentences
134things to hear, say and find
Freeno account, nothing to install
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Four minutes, headphones on. It is the one that shows you the problem.

Letters

where it starts

You were taught that a letter has a sound. It has several, and which one you get depends on the company it keeps.

Listening

no microphone needed

Every one of these plays real speech at real speed and asks you what happened. Nothing to set up, nothing that can fail.

Your voice

needs a microphone

The machine is not scoring your accent. It is telling you what a listener heard — which is a lower bar than good pronunciation, and a far more useful one.

Writing

the invisible half

A bad vowel you can hear. A wrong preposition you cannot — you will reread your own sentence ten times and see nothing. So these ask you to find it, and offer you nothing.

Then the arcade stops being a wall.

Upstairs there are 12 games built around the TOEFL tasks — writing an email, taking an interview, reading an academic passage. Every one of them assumes you can already follow English as it is spoken. This floor is where that assumption gets earned.

Go up to the arcade →