Table of Contents
A lack of information makes English unnecessarily hard to learn
You can’t learn the sound of many English words by sounding them out.
Women, any, busy, colonel, bury, syringe, cycle …
English words can make literally thousands of sounds.
“Signed” could make 184,320 different sounds. Yes, really

Better information does make reading much easier
In Roman times, words were hard to read as they were written in capitals with no spaces or punctuation.
NOWONDERHESSAD
French monks added spaces, punctuation and upper and lower case letters and made reading a lot easier
No wonder he’s sad.
What information is English missing?
- You need to know exactly what sound each character makes in a word. The problem is that English has 42 characters and 26 letters, so many letters must make more than 1 sound. “u” has 7 sounds: up (its usual sound) and busy, quick, bury, fruit, use, and put.
- You need to know which letters are silent: the letter “g” is pronounced in the word “signature” but not in “sign”.
- You need to know where the syllable breaks in a word are: baked (1 syllable) and naked (2 syllables)
- And you need to know which syllable is stressed:
CON.tract means an agreement
Con.TRACT means to get shorter
Phonics helps (a bit)
Phonics or synthetic phonics is currently used in many countries to teach English. Phonics provides you with some information to make English spelling a little more predictable. But low literacy rates in English speaking countries shows it does not work very well.
[read more text=”unique call-to-action text here”]Phonics works much better than rote learning but phonics uses multiple complex pronunciation and syllabification rules and exceptions are learned by rote.
When you see a new word, you don’t know if the word is phonetic and can be sounded out character by character, if a pronunciation rule applies and which rule applies, or if the word is an exception and must be learned by rote. And how do you find out what sound the exception makes? [/read]
Fonetic English is Phonics turbocharged
Fonetic English gives you the simple and intuitive information that you need to accurately decode the sound of any English word, with next to nothing for you to learn, and without changing the spelling and the shape of the word:
- Letters without superscript characters make their usual sound
- Greyed out characters are not pronounced: the “g” in “sign” is not pronounced
- If a letter has a superscript character, that letter makes the sound of the superscript, not its usual sound: bűsy, qüick, būry, frñit, ůse, pùt. As English characters are used as the superscript, and as you know the sounds of these characters, the only two things you need to learn are:
- The digraph “\\”. There is no English character for the sound “oo” in “foot” or “u” in “put”, so we added the digraph “\\” which makes this sound, so “f\\t” and “too” can be easily distinguished.
- The digraph “th” indicates it is unvoiced (three) and the digraph “tң” indicates it is voiced (that)
- Capitalized vowel superscripts say their name: “you” becomes “yoů”, and the “y” in “any” becomes “—ä–ný” making the sound /ee/
- Words like “able” are spelled “—â–Εle” and pronounced “—â–bul”
- Stressed syllables are preceded by the symbol —, as in —con–tract and con—tract, with the symbol – preceding the unstressed syllables
Image of Fonetic English text

Fonetic English Dictionary
The Fonetic English Dictionary is a dictionary of over 40,000 words and growing:
- Words are spelled in Fonetic English with US, UK pronunciations, as well as standard English
- Homographs with different sounds are spelled differently in Fonetic English e.g. wind (a movement of air) and wínd (wind a clock)
- Each different meaning of a word is defined in simple language with 2 usage examples
- Simple definitions of idioms, phrasal verbs and multiword entries (e.g. “managing director”) are provided with two usage examples
- Images are shown when images are easier to understand than definitions: an image of a square is easier to understand than its definition: a 2 dimensional figure with four equal straight sides and four right angles
- Words pronounced
- With different accents
- Syllable by syllable with variable pauses between the syllables
- Each syllable progressively sounded phoneme by phoneme
- Translations in foreign languages for each different definition and each usage example
Quickly mastering reading with Fonetic English
The key to mastering English reading is to learn to recognize the shape of the word and instantly know the word’s sound.
In Roman times, everyone read aloud. When French monks added upper- and lower-case letters, spaces and punctuation in the 8th and 9th centuries, people started to read silently.
Silent reading repurposes the speech and auditory part of the brain. Unsurprisingly this auditory part of the brain operates most efficiently at the speed of conversational speech. Reading at the speed of conversational speech is called fluent reading. Fluent readers have better comprehension and learning outcomes than slower readers.
Fluent reading at conversational speed does not give you time to decode the sound of a word by sounding it out: you must be able to recognize the shape of the word and instantly know its sound, which is called sightword recognition.

An example of sightword recognition is when you see a STOP sign. You hear STOP in your head at the same time you see the sign.
Phonetic languages are easier to learn
Random information is hard to remember. Can you remember these characters?
r g o d n a
These letters are random, and we humans are not good at remembering random information.
However, we humans are very good at recognizing and remembering things that make sense. Here are these letters in a different order
“dragon” is easy to remember because it makes sense to us!
Phonetic languages allow you to sound out words letter by letter with no rules or exceptions. The decoded sound makes sense. Because we humans have evolved to remember what makes sense, we can easily remember it, as we saw with the word “dragon”.
Many of you can learn a sightword by sounding out the word letter by letter as few as 3-5 times. That may be all the repetition required for you to remember the shape of a phonetic word and its sound.
Most of you will sound out new Fonetic English words correctly and you won’t have to unlearn mispronunciation to learn the correct sound, which is the fossilization problem.
With non phonetic words, the sound is much more random information which humans are very poor at remembering as we saw with the letters “r g o d n a”. It can take 20-50 repetitions to learn a non phonetic word by rote.
Maybe this is why reading levels are not improving: fewer students are prepared to endure what can feel like endless repetition to learn sightwords by rote.
Now this knowledge about the difficulty of learning to read English is not new.
Prof Seymour from Dundee University in the UK showed in a 2003 journal article that English students took years longer to read erratically spelled English than did Finns or Italians whose languages are phonetic, and whose words can be simply sounded out.
Prof Paulesu conducted a research project in Italy looking for the Anglo Saxon dyslexia gene that was hypothesized because dyslexia was rarely diagnosed in Italy, and common in the UK and other English speaking countries. Instead, in a paper published in 2001 paper, they found that some Italians in their test group did in fact have dyslexia. What surprised the researchers was that these dyslexic Italians could read well enough to progress through the Italian education system without special interventions. This surprising result was explained by the phonetic nature of the Italian language, which made reading easier even for dyslexics.
The poor performance of English speaking students is predicted by Cognitive Load Theory
Cognitive Load Theory shows conclusively that if all the information needed to perform a learning task is provided to a group of students, then these students will out perform other students who are only provided with partial information for the learning task.
Cognitive Load Theory is an experimentally based theory founded by UNSW Prof John Sweller that has studied how to present information to optimize learning outcomes. It has been adopted by many learning organizations including the NSW Department of Education. More …
Fonetic English is a novel application of Cognitive Load Theory. More…
Automatic transition from Fonetic English to standard English
Have you ever wondered why you can read handwriting and different fonts, including Fonetic English?
We humans have evolved to recognize the shape of hiding predators, especially snakes.
The colour of the snake is the same as the background, so it is the shape of the camouflaged snake that we can recognize. And we can recognize camouflaged snakes in all sorts of different positions. This is an amazing skill we humans have evolved.
So, once you can recognize the shape of a word, you can use our evolved predator recognition skill to read that word no matter how the word is written. It can be printed normally, can be in a curly type, can be printed badly or the letters can be handwritten, and we can still recognize it by its shape.
In fact, being able to recognize disguised words is how we can prȷve to some websites that we are humans, not com—pů–ters.
As the shape and spelling of a word does not change when marked up into Fonetic English, you can read a word shape in both Fonetic English and in standard English. So, there is an automatic transition from reading in Fonetic English to reading in standard English.
Quickly developing fluent reading with Fonetic English
To read fluently, you need to read at conversational speed and this means you don’t have time to decode words. So you must be able to look at a word and instantly know its sound, which are called sightwords. To be able to read by sight, you must learn a lot of sightwords.
Fonetic English makes learning sightwords easy and fast using 4 advanced techniques:
Mastering the sound of letters (for everyone). More …
1. When you see an English or Fonetic English letter you know the sound instantly and automatically without having to think about it.
Fonetic English will test everyone by playing the sounds of phonemes and we want you to select the right character that makes that sound. If you get a sound or character wrong, you will be explicitly taught the sound and/or the character. The sound of Fonetic English characters will also be taught using this process. The outcome should be mastery: we want to be able to select the right character without thinking, so there is no hesitation and no splitting of your attention.
Intelligent repetition technology is also employed. When you can select the character that represents the sound correctly and without hesitation, the intelligent repetition system will automatically ensure that you will no longer be presented with that character.
2. A new way of teaching English sounds to non native English speakers
Fonetic English has studied the phonemes of many foreign languages to find out what phonemes in a foreign language are exact matches to English, close matches and what phonemes are missing. Exact and close matches can be taught to you by spelling the English phoneme in the foreign language. In addition, English phonemes that are missing from a foreign language can be taught be using borrowed words, brands or place names containing those phonemes. [expander_maker id=”1″ more=”Read more” less=”Read less”]We can teach you to discriminate new English sounds using syllables containing phonemes that are common to both English and your native language. Gradually you will be taught with fewer and fewer characters until you can accurately hear the English phoneme.
Having the syllables spelled in Fonetic English will mean that you know what exactly what sounds to listen for and this is likely to significantly speed up your ability to hear English sounds accurately.
The process for teaching English sounds will be optimized for each foreign language. More … [/expander_maker]
3. Progressively sounding out letters or phonemes.
Fonetic English has developed a new progressive sound out method that makes sounding and learning syllables easier, and has developed a system where you can listen to Fonetic English progressively sounding out each syllable, so you can learn to sound out new syllables by yourself.
4. Sounding out words syllable by syllable.
Sounding out words syllable by syllable is easy as you just say the first syllable and then the second without a pause.
Here are two syllables: “black” and “smith” and the compound word is “blacksmith”. More… (link to video)
Learning the sound of syllables is a very efficient way to learn sightwords:
- Syllables are short, so they are quick and easy to learn.
- Learning the sound of sightwords by sounding out syllables is very efficient. 36 words are made up solely of these 15 syllables: ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘in’, ‘out’, ‘on’, ‘off’, ‘ing’, ‘under’, ‘side’, ‘set’, ‘flow’, ‘go’, ‘grow’, ‘put’, ‘hold’. Learning 15 syllables is faster and easier then learning 36 words. More…
- When you encounter a new multisyllable word, you may only need to learn one or two syllables because you already know the sounds of the other syllables.
- The limits on working memory only apply to new information. So if you have already learned a number of syllables, you should be able to sound out long, multisyllable words containing some of your known syllables.
The need for practice
As explained earlier, Fonetic English can significantly reduce the repetition needed to learn to read by providing additional decoding information and new techniques to make the learning of sightwords much more efficient.
You may be surprised to discover that your brain needs to physically change for you to read fluently. New neural connections or pathways between different parts of your brain need to be established and/or optimized. These neural pathways or neural connections need a myelin coating around the pathway to allow the electrical signals of your brain to flow at the speed required for fluent reading. The myeline needed for fluent reading actually makes your brain heavier.
The only way to myelinate or optimize these connections essential for reading is through reading practice.
Fonetic English graded reading materials
Fonetic English wants you to read a lot because you enjoy it and find reading pleasurable. One way to make this happen is to provide you with interesting reading materials. Fonetic English has a reading practice app and you can choose graded reading materials in Fonetic English that interests you. More …
Later, individualized graded reading materials will be generated by AI on specific subjects that interest you. These topics could include reading practice materials on topics that you are studying, which is likely to improve your learning outcomes in that topic. More …
Fonetic English Document Conversion App
Fonetic English also has a text conversion facility where an interesting English document can be uploaded, and automatically converted into Fonetic English. You can have the converted document emailed to you, or read the converted document on the Fonetic English website. More
Learning vocabulary efficiently with Fonetic English
Novel vocabulary teaching methods are being developed that will use information from the dictionary, intelligently teaching you the meaning of new words. The vocabulary system is scheduled to be released around Q3, 2024.
Using AI to help you self learn and reduce repetition
The system has been designed for you to self learn.
You are provided with all the text, image and sound information you need to efficiently learn new words.
As discussed above, you need some repetition to develop mastery where you can hear English, read English and speak English without having to split your attention between decoding the information and understand the information being communicated.
The system has been designed to minimize the repetition required, firstly using learning techniques discussed earlier that minimize repetition, and secondly using AI based systems that can judge whether you know something, and teach only things that you don’t know.
Improving Conversational skills
When you hear a foreign language, it can feels like a continuous stream of sound, but to a foreign language speaker, it sounds like discrete words being spoken.
Learning to accurately discriminate spoken English effortlessly is necessary if you are going to be able to devote your full attention to the meaning of what is being said, which is required for good comprehension.
Text will be recorded in 4 different ways: normal conversational speed, slow conversational speed, slow conversational speed with a short pause between words, and slow conversational speed with a longer pause between words.
The text will also be recorded in different accents which can help you better discriminate English text being read to them. You will be encouraged to start listening to native English speakers when you can.
You will also be able to hear text read to you while each word is being highlighted, which may be very useful in the beginning but can be a distraction when you are more advanced.
You can learn dictation skills by having a group of Fonetic English words presented to you and then hearing a sentence read to you. You will need to click on the right words in the right order. The text can be read at different speeds and with different accents.
Improving your pronunciation
Tools are provided so that you can record your pronunciation of phonemes, syllables and words, and compare them to a native speaker. You will hear their pronunciation, the native English speaker’s pronunciation, your pronunciation, the native English speaker’s pronunciation, and so on played quickly one after the other. This will help your to distinguish differences in the pronunciations.
Once you have learned to accurately discriminate English phonemes, syllables and words, you will be able to hear the differences with the pronunciation of a native speaker, and you can start to self improve their accent.