The silent letter and grapheme features were inspired by the Céline Alvarez method, a pedagogical approach designed to facilitate reading for young French speakers. In this method, letter combinations representing a single sound are highlighted in specific colors, while silent letters are greyed out. This visual aid helps learners decode words more intuitively by making the relationship between letters and sounds explicit.
French spelling can be tricky because multiple letters often combine to make a single sound. Our Grapheme mode uses a set of heuristics to identify and highlight these combinations (like eau, ch, qu) using alternating colors. This helps learners visualize which letters belong together, simplifying reading.
Many letters in French are written but not pronounced. The Silent Letters feature uses algorithmic rules to detect these (like the ts in parents or the ent in 3rd person verb conjugations) and greys them out. This allows the reader to focus only on the sounds they need to pronounce.
In French, a normally silent final consonant is often pronounced when the next word begins with a vowel. Our Liaison feature draws a blue arc between these words. It also overrides the greyed-out silent letters as well as the letter combo of nasal sounds to show the correct pronunciation when a liaison occurs.
Syllable mode helps you learn French pronunciation by connecting sounds in new words to sounds you already know from familiar words. Instead of learning phonetic symbols or spelling rules, you'll use visual emoji cues that link syllable sounds together.
When you view text in syllable mode, certain syllables are highlighted. These highlighted syllables have matching sounds in our database of familiar French words. When you click on a highlighted syllable, an emoji appears above it. This emoji represents a syllable sound that you can recognize from a word you already know.
The system matches syllable sounds based on where they appear in the word:
The system works by matching syllable sounds from your text to syllable sounds in familiar words stored in our database. Each emoji-word pair in the database represents one or more syllable sounds. When a syllable in your text matches one of these sounds, the corresponding emoji appears to help you with pronunciation.
This approach is based on the idea that it's easier to match syllable sounds to syllable sounds in words you already know, rather than trying to learn a phonetic alphabet or memorize spelling-to-sound rules. By activating your existing knowledge of how familiar words sound, you can apply that knowledge to be able to pronounce the words in a new text.