Record a sentence to get transcription, phonetics and translation

This is the feature the rest of Teachee is arranged around, so it is worth understanding exactly what one press produces.

The interaction

Click and hold the record button. Say the sentence. Release.

That is the whole gesture. It is push-to-talk deliberately rather than a start/stop toggle, because a toggle left running records the next four minutes of the lesson and you find out later.

What you get back

One recording produces four things attached to a single line in the lesson:

Output	What it is
Audio	The recording itself, replayable by the student
Transcript	What was said, as text
Phonetics	IPA transcription — US or UK for English
Translation	Into the student’s language, suggested and editable

All four appear on the student’s screen while you are still talking about the sentence. They do not have to write anything down, which matters more than it sounds: a student taking dictation is not listening.

Why the phonetics are the point

A written sentence tells a student what was said. It does not tell them how it sounded, and for anything with opaque spelling — English, French, Danish — the written form actively misleads.

The transcription closes that gap without you typing a single symbol. There is no IPA keyboard on any normal device, which is the practical reason phonetic transcription is missing from almost every teacher’s lesson notes despite everyone agreeing it is useful. See IPA vs phonetic respelling for why the notation is worth having at all, and using the IPA with students for how much of it a student actually needs (four to eight symbols, not the chart).

US or UK for English. Choose the one you teach. /ˈwɔːtər/ and /ˈwɔːtə/ are different targets and a student practising against the wrong one is practising the wrong thing.

The translation gets better

Translations are suggestions, and you correct the ones that are wrong. Those corrections are remembered.

If you once decided that What’s up? is Quoi de neuf? rather than something more literal, that is what comes back the next time it appears. Over a term this converges on your own register and your own idiom, which is the part a general-purpose translator cannot know.

Correct them when they are wrong. It is the only training signal the system gets, and it pays back within a few lessons.

Where this fits in a lesson

The high-value moment is not when you introduce a sentence. It is when a student reaches for a sentence and cannot finish it.

That sentence is already motivated, already at their level, and already the thing they wanted to say. It is the single best study material that exists for them, and it is normally lost — because capturing it by hand means typing the sentence, looking up the translation, finding the transcription and formatting the lot, which nobody does mid-lesson.

Record it instead. Eight seconds, and it survives.

The rest of the argument for working this way is in lesson notes students actually reuse — specifically the four-block format, where these sentences are block one.

After the lesson

Sentences captured this way become the student’s review material rather than a document they stop opening. Add tags and they export to Anki as real cards — sentence, audio, transcription — which is what makes spaced repetition run on your lessons instead of on a stranger’s word list.

If the record button does nothing

Almost always a microphone permission, at the browser or OS level rather than in Teachee. Fix in microphone not working.