From the team behind Teachee
Most pronunciation advice is “just listen more”. This isn’t that.
Every guide here names the specific sound, tells you where in the mouth it is made, explains which sound you are substituting instead, and gives you a drill. 29 languages, 67 phonetic symbols, and the teaching playbooks that go with them.
Start with the sound, not the language
Nearly every accent problem is a substitution: the learner reaches for the nearest sound they already own. Once you can name the substitution, it becomes a drill instead of a mystery.
French ʁ
Substituted with the English ɹ or over-corrected into a Spanish trill. It is neither — it is made at the uvula, where you gargle.
Polish ɕ
English has one “sh”. Polish has three sibilant series. Your single ʃ lands between two of them and sounds wrong for both.
Mandarin tone 3
Drilled to perfection in isolation, then flattened the moment it enters a sentence — where sandhi has already changed it anyway.
Arabic ʕ
Usually skipped entirely, because there is no English sound close enough to substitute. It is a full consonant and words are unrecognisable without it.
Pronunciation guides by language
All 29 languages →Guides
All guides →How to create a lesson
A lesson is a live document with its own URL that you and your student both edit during the call. Here is how to make one, what goes in it, and how it differs from a shared doc.
Lesson notes students actually reuse
Most lesson notes are written once and never opened again. The difference between notes that die and notes that get reused is structure, not effort — here is the format and the ten-minute workflow behind it.
How to read the IPA
You do not need the whole chart. You need the twenty symbols that differ from your expectations, plus the logic behind the layout — after which the rest is lookup.
Spaced repetition, explained properly
Why reviewing something just before you forget it beats reviewing it daily, what the intervals actually are, and the four mistakes that make most people's spaced repetition useless.
How to teach pronunciation online
Video lessons strip out the mouth, the room and half the frequency range. Here is a method for correcting pronunciation over video that does not rely on the student being able to see your tongue.
Guides for online language teachers
Practical playbooks for teaching languages online: pronunciation correction, homework that gets done, lesson notes students reuse, pricing, retention and the tool stack that supports all of it.
For learnersGuides for language learners
Evidence-informed methods for learning a language as an adult: spaced repetition, shadowing, minimal pairs, comprehensible input, and how to stop understanding everything while still being unable to speak.
ReferencePhonetics and pronunciation reference
The International Phonetic Alphabet explained, plus reference material on sounds, scripts and transcription for teachers and serious learners.
ComparisonsTool comparisons for language teaching
Honest comparisons of the tools language teachers and learners actually use: Anki, Quizlet, shared documents, video platforms and purpose-built lesson tools.
How toHow to use Teachee
Practical how-tos for Teachee: creating and sharing lessons, recording a sentence to get transcription, phonetics and translation, tagging for Anki export, and fixing microphone problems.
The product
Teachee turns a spoken sentence into study material, mid-lesson
You say the sentence once. Teachee transcribes it, translates it, generates the phonetics, and puts it on your student’s screen live — then exports the lot to Anki when the lesson ends. It runs alongside whatever video software you already use.
- One-click recording during the lesson
- Speech-to-text, translation and phonetic transcription
- Live-synced lesson board both of you can see
- Voice-recognition practice between lessons
- Anki export, so nothing you made gets thrown away