Say It Right Online

The "Say It Right" program was put on the market in 2010 and was addressed to Polish students aware of the fact that learning English must include spending time on discovering the principles of correct pronunciation, particularly that this element is often neglected in English language classes or during various English courses, while – paradoxically – it is pronunciation that is the most frequent source of miscommunication. One can often hear an opinion that learning pronunciation is a waste of time because even if we speak English with a heavy foreign accent, people will still understand us. Unfortunately, it is quite the opposite. First, if we pronounce words incorrectly, even native speakers may have troubles understanding what we want to say and, second, our chances of understanding others, especially native speakers of English – the British, the Americans, the Irish, the Australians, Canadians and others are much smaller. Seven years after its creation, the Say It Right course has been significantly remodelled. Following the opinions of the program's users, we have introduced a number of changes, which – we believe – will make it even more attractive and will expand its functionality. First of all, the program will now be available for various platforms – from desktop computers and laptops to smartphones and tablets. You will, therefore, be able to use it at any time or place. The contents have been enriched with vocabulary that came into being in recent years. We have added a phonetic transcription of all words, phrases, sentences, and even texts. We have changed the way of playing the recordings – pressing the button "Play all", you will still hear the speakers pronouncing all the words, phrases, and sentences from a given exercise, but if you press the button "Play with pauses", there will be a short pause after each of them, allowing the learner to repeat the given text unit after the speaker. In "Common words", we added a function that allows for a selection of all words from that exercise or only words selected by the learner on the basis of the word frequency ranking. The user may also select words on the basis of the position of the selected sound in the word (initial, medial, or final).