We call Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish Phonics 2.0 — a generational upgrade.
With Phonics 2.0, learning English becomes logical, clear, and fast.
English spelling is broken
What is Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish is an online set of learning tools that saves learning time by helping students to read, hear, and pronounce English accurately that can be used with any curriculum.
“A series of brilliant innovations that will revolutionize language teaching”
UNSW Prof Emeritus
John Sweller, Founder of
Cognitive Load Theory
Most English words are not pronounced as spelled. Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish adds all the information needed to quickly and confidently sound out any English word. Words that are sounded out are easier to remember, allowing learners to recognise words at a glance, leading to fluent reading and improved comprehension.
Listening training, and guided mouth-movement instruction, support confident conversational skills by helping students learn faster with less repetition.
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish learning tools can be used with any curriculum.
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish helps everyone
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish helps people learn English faster and more easily. When learning is faster, the total time—and the total cost—to reach good English is lower. Most English classes are paid for by time. So when students learn faster, they need fewer months of classes and pay less in total.
- Faster progress also means students can reach work, university, or exam goals sooner. This reduces the cost of waiting longer to study or to start work.
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish also helps teachers teach more efficiently. Tutors can give students clear practice to do between lessons. This can make lessons shorter and reduce the total number of lessons needed. Better listening skills, better pronunciation, better sounding-out of words, and better reading lead to better school results and better job chances in the future.
- Faster Learning helps everyone:
- Students and families: Fewer months of fees, faster results, and better long-term outcomes make English learning more affordable.
- Tutors, private schools, and English colleges: A more efficient system lowers the cost per successful student, brings in more students, and can support higher hourly rates while still lowering the total cost for each student.
- Schools: Better English results help schools attract and keep more students.
English spelling often lacks the information needed to decode words accurately.
- There are 42 English sounds but only 26 characters, so letters make more than one sound.
"signed" has "76,800" possible pronunciations under standard rules.
- So many words can’t be sounded out reliably:
How “signed” can make 76,800 different sounds
- The result:
- Nobody can succeed when they’re missing so much information.
- So English-speaking learners take 2.5–3 years to reach fluency.
- Italian dyslexics can graduate university without reading intervention because phonetic Italian is easier to learn than irregular English. Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish helps struggling readers by making English phonetic, more like Italian.
- In phonetic languages like Finnish, learners become fluent in 6 months.
- The problem isn’t you. The problem is English spelling. But if we add the missing information to English, we can learn more like the Finns — in way less time.
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish can be learned in minutes
The Golden Rule
Video: How Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish Works
How the Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish Font Works
- Letters with no superscripts make their usual sounds a , b , c
- Pronounce the superscript not the letter ş, ć, č, ü, æ
- Capital vowels say their name â, ê, í, õ, ů, Ẃ, ý, Υ
- Greyed out letters are silent: “know” pronounced nõ; “debt” pronounced det
- Stressed syllables start with • and unstressed syllables start with ◦, e.g. √con…tract (agreement) and con√tract (get smaller)
- A consonant with the superscript u makes the sound “consonant u”, e.g. the syllable …Εle in √câ…Εle makes the sound "bul".
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish can be learned in minutes
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish em√beds āll tңê in…for√mâ…ťiòn yoů nêed tȷ √qüick…lý, in√tů…it…ive…lý and √acc…ů…rate…lý sijund ijut √än…ý √Ēng…lish wòrd, which is tңè √rê…ál ob√jec…tive of √Рho…nics 1.0. With Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish, thẂre iş next tȷ √nò…thing tȷ learn! √Män…ý √pêo…ဇle can √fig…ure ijut Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish just bΥ √sêe…ing text in Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish.
- With these few rules, you can decode any English word — confidently, accurately, and without exceptions.
Backed by Established Science
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish is built on proven science from leaders like Sweller, Geary, Ericsson, Hebb, Kuhl, Merzenich, Bjork, Roediger, Guenther, and Flege. We teach clearly, practise deliberately, test for memory, build pronunciation skills through motor learning, and reinforce understanding through spaced revision.
A summary of the Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish teaching methodology and its scientific basis can be viewed here.
A more detailed description of the Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish teaching methodology and its scientific basis can be viewed here.
Prof. John Sweller, the founder of Cognitive Load Theory,
has co-authored a paper with us explaining how
Humans did not evolve to read, and must be explicitly taught the reading process
Reading is not natural; humans didn’t evolve to read. The reading process:
- We look at a line of written words and “hear” the silent words in our minds.
- We repurpose the speech part of the brain to “hear” and understand the silent words in our head.
- We understand best when we read at the speed we speak — about 100 words per minute, called fluent reading.
- At fluent reading speed, there’s no time to decode the sounds of words
- We have to look at a word and instantly know its sound and meaning.
- Words recognised instantly like this are called sightwords.
- The fastest path to fluent reading is the rapid acquisition of sightwords.
Learn sightwords quickly using Progressive Sounding Out
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish enables the sounding out of long syllables with progressive sounding-out:
- Progressive sounding-out: there are just two pieces in working memory so even long syllables can be sounded out:
- 1. the blended sound so far, and
- 2. the next sound to add.
- Worked example — the syllable “strengths”:
-
1. s + t → st
-
2. st + r → str
-
3. str + e → stre
-
4. stre + ng → streng
-
5. streng + th → strength
-
6. strength + s → strengths
progressive sounding out
Learning sightwords is even faster with syllables
- Syllables are a natural building blocks units of spoken language.
- Simply make the sounds of “black” and “smith” without a pause to say the word “blacksmith”. Its easy to sound out words syllable by syllable.
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish optimizes syllable breaks
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish marks syllable boundaries so the syllables are instantly recognizable, their meanings are clear, and the pronunciation of the word is accurate. Some dictionaries focus on making the sound as accurate as possible, but this can lead to problems:
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish mark up of “parking”: •park◦ing → learners instantly see park + the suffix “ing” – easy to recognize, with meaning maintained, and accurate pronunciation.
- Compare to mark up in some other dictionaries: •par◦king → accurate pronunciation but par + king obscures meaning and is harder to recognize.
- Why syllables reduce overload
- Most syllables have just 2–4 phonemes, so they’re short, learnable chunks.
- Familiar syllables become reusable building blocks across many words.
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish teaches the most frequent syllables first, so recognition compounds quickly.
- The old way to sound out words can overwhelm learners:
- Familiar syllables become reusable building blocks across many words.
- s + t + r + e + ng + th + s = 8 separate items in working memory.
- Humans can only juggle a few bits of information in working memory; pushing past that limit feels like overwhelm and no learning happens. Longer syllables can be hard to sound out.
- The fast track to thousands of words
- Master 200 common syllables and you can decode 4,000–5,000 words built from them
- When you can recognize syllables by sight, you can sound out words syllable by syllable, making it easy and fast to learn sight words.
- Use Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish tools to hear
- Any word pronounced slowly with clear syllables sounds,
- Any word pronounced syllable by syllable,
- Any syllable progressively sounded out phoneme by phoneme
- Exercises are provided to help students quickly learn sightwords and to recognize syllables by sight.
Video: Practice recognizing syllables
Reading practice that builds every skill
The fastest way to improve English is to read a lot. Once decoding is easy with Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish, students can focus on meaning and build vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension through wide reading.
We will provide reading practice materials at the right level for each student — texts they actually want to read. These can be based on school subjects (for example, for an Indonesian student, Indonesian history written in English so they learn history and improve English at the same time) or on topics chosen by the students themselves. That way, learners build English while also learning about things that matter to them.
Every text will come with comprehension questions. If a student answers incorrectly, they will receive a hint and a chance to try again. By the time they get the right answer, they will also understand why it is right.
The Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish eReader App
- The Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish eReader app makes practice personal and powerful. Students can:
- Read any text in Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish with full decoding support.
- Tap any word to hear it, see the syllables sounded out, and compare their own pronunciation.
- Instantly see word-by-word translations into their native language.
- Build vocabulary faster by linking sound, spelling, meaning, and translation in one step.
- With the Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish eReader, every reading session strengthens decoding, comprehension, and vocabulary — all at once.
The Advanced Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish Dictionary
- 25000+ English words with simple definitions, examples, images and links to related words
- Comprehensive lists of phrasal verbs and idioms
- Hear every word spoken slowly, hear every syllable pronounced clearly and every syllable progressively sounded out
- Practice your pronunciation by recording your voice and comparing instantly with the native reference
Vocabulary
- In addition to the eReader and the Dictionary, a purpose built vocabulary teaching tool has been developed from the eReader.
vocabulary
Once you learn a word in Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish, you can read it in standard English
Humans evolved the ability to spot the shape of camouflaged predators, like snakes hiding in the grass. Even when colour blends into the background, our brains instantly pick out the outline as in the image below.
This same skill lets us recognise the shape of words.
Once you’ve sounded out a word in Fonetic English, its shape is locked in.
From then on, you can recognise it instantly — no matter whether it’s:
- printed in a normal font
- written in curly script
- badly printed
- handwritten
- Disguised words are used to prove we are humans, not computers
In fact,
being
able to
recognize
disguised words
is how we can
prȷve
to some websites
that we are humans, not
com√půt…ers
.
By using the brain’s built-in shape recognition, learning a word in FE means you can read it anywhere, in any style of English writing.
Learning English Sounds: We Only teach you the English Sounds YOU DON'T KNOW
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish has analysed the phonemes in your native language with English:
- Same sound, same spelling – there is nothing to learn – you already know the phonemes and how they are represented
- Same sound, different spelling – you know the sound, you just need to learn the spelling
- Close Sound – the sounds are similar, you should be able learn to make these sounds quickly and accurately by following the mouth movement instructions. Hearing accuracy will follow.
- Missing sounds.
- Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish has found 10-20 of the most common English words starting with or containing the missing sound many students find that they know the sound but didn’t know they did.
- If there are missing sounds you do not know, you will learn them by
- hearing syllables that contain one or more phonemes that are in both English and your native language, and
- selecting the correct spelling of the syllable from a number of options.
Accurate English Pronunciation
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish created detailed mouth movement instructions because it could not find suitable mouth movement instructions:
Other ways Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish can improve your conversational skills
- Learning the Soft Sounds: f, h, l, p and th.
- The mouth movements for these sounds are not difficult, but many students can make them but think they are not making the right sound because the sounds are so soft. Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish fixes this problem by teaching these soft consonants followed by a vowel.
Other ways Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish can improve your conversational skills
- Learning f, h, l, p and th. The mouth movements for these sounds are not difficult but many students can make them but think they are not making the right sound because the sounds are so soft. Fonetic English fixes this problem by teaching these soft consonants followed by a vowel.
- Learning difficult sounds like l and r for Chinese and Japanese. Special exercises have been designed to help you master these difficult sounds.
Reporting
- Student activity is logged and daily, weekly and custom reports for students, parents and education organizations are available.
Pricing to be announced shortly
Try Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish free for one month
We want every learner to succeed — so you can try Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish for free for your first month. See for yourself how quickly reading becomes easier, more confident, and less stressful.
Simple, fair pricing
Fo√ne…tic √Ēng…lish is priced to be affordable everywhere. A monthly subscription costs about the same as 2 Big Mac’s per month in your country (borrowed from the Economist Big Mac Index) — a small cost for a premium service that can transform your reading and learning.
Rewards for effort
We know that success comes from regular practice. That’s why we reward students who put in the time:
- 20% discount for students if the student practises for 30 minutes every day.
- 45% discount if the student practises for 1 hour every day.
Online reminders to students, their parents or their schools can be provided so that students don’t forget to use the system and lose their discount.
The more you practise, the less you pay — because the harder you work, the faster you improve.
