The method
Where your vowels land
One ring per lexical set — so start sits apart from lot, and north apart from thought, which is how English really works and how the programs score you. Each ring is one standard deviation of real recordings; an arrow means the vowel is a route, not a note. Switch on the language you grew up with to see which English vowels it covers and which it misses.
Push the map sideways to see all of it.
u GOOSE — In American English goose is said near the middle of the mouth, lips rounded — not deep at the back. Most forward after t, d, s, n, y (two, soon, new, you); back before l (pool).
What you are looking at
A vowel is not a letter, it is a shape: where the tongue sits and how round the lips are. That shape shows up in the sound as two resonances — F1, which falls as the tongue rises, and F2, which rises as it comes forward. Plot every recorded vowel by those two numbers and a language turns into a map. Each ring here is one standard deviation around a vowel's average, so it covers the ground real speakers actually use, not a textbook point.
This is the map the programs are built on. Phonema writes the vowel down — the same IPA, one notation across the whole family. Antiphon listens to you say it and asks the question this picture answers: where did your vowel land? Sentio, the flagship, judges an attempt against these rings; it has no app yet, so this chart is the piece of it you can look at today.
Switch on Polish, Spanish or Russian and the learner's problem is one picture wide: five or six vowels asked to cover eleven. Wherever one mark of your first language sits between two English rings, that is the pair you will keep hearing as the same word — ship and sheep, bed and bad. Change the base to see the same vowels thirty years ago, or a child's mouth beside an adult's: the map moves, which is why the apps measure instead of assuming.
Nothing here is sent anywhere. The chart is drawn in your browser from numbers that came with the page, and the switches you set are remembered on this device only.
