Support

How to use it

Type any English word, or pick a recent one.
Press play. Use the speed row to slow it down — 0.25x is slow enough to follow the tongue, 0.1x is slow enough to hold each shape and copy it.
Tap any sound in the row to freeze it. A held frame shows the exact target position, which is the one you want to copy.
Use ‹ and › to step through the word one sound at a time.
The cross-section is the second picture. The amber ring marks the contact point — the "put your tongue there" instruction. The blue dashes are the air. The green circle at the bottom is the voice, lit only when it is on.

Why does the mouth keep moving after the voice stops?

Because that is correct, below 1x. Phones do not slow speech down as far as they are asked to — at 0.1x the audio comes out barely longer than at normal speed, while the animation genuinely takes ten times as long. The mouth is the point, so it runs the full length of the word. Keep watching; the remaining shapes are the rest of the word.

Why is the mouth slightly out of step with the audio?

Mobile speech engines report when a word starts and when it finishes, and nothing in between — no phoneme boundaries. So the timing of each sound comes from a model of English durations rather than from the voice itself. The two agree at the start of a word and drift a little across it: at 1x a long word can end about a tenth of a second out. Since the app is built for watching slowly, that is the right trade.

I hear nothing

On an iPhone, speech follows the physical ringer switch — a phone on silent plays nothing, and an app cannot detect that. Check the switch on the side. In a browser, check the tab is not muted and that your browser has an English voice installed.

A word says "estimated"

That word is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so the pronunciation was worked out from spelling rules. English spelling being what it is, treat it as a hint rather than a fact. Names and very new words are the usual cases.

The vowel is not the one I say

The dictionary behind LinguaKata describes General American English. If you speak British, Irish, Australian or Indian English, some words will legitimately differ — "bath", "lot" and anything with an "r" after a vowel are the usual suspects.

Can it hear me and tell me if I got it right?

No. LinguaKata has no microphone and does no scoring. It shows you the movement; copying it is your part. Listening to a learner and comparing formants is a genuinely different and much larger app.

Which platforms?

The web version runs in any modern browser. The iPhone version is in TestFlight. There is no Android build yet. Judge the shapes on the web and the audio on a phone — browser voices differ from the ones your device ships with.

Deleting your data

On a phone, delete the app. In a browser, clear this site's data. Nothing is stored anywhere else — see the privacy page.