According to the Census Bureau, 62 million U.S. residents spoke a language other than English at home. Of those who spoke a foreign language at home, (41 percent) - so 25 million people- said they only speak English less than well. Imagine how hard it would be to live in the U.S. not knowing English.
So why do almost half of foreigners in the U.S. not know English well?, Why is it so hard?
It’s because if you really want to be fluent in a language, you have to think in that language.
Believe it or not, the most important part of learning another language is pronunciation.
Everytime you read or say a word in a foreign language, you internally say it back to yourself. So it’s very important how it sounds, because if you say it wrong or don’t know how to pronounce a word, it becomes a lot harder to remember those words.
So Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you’re reading this sentence.
我的氣墊船裝滿了鱔魚 Wǒ de qìdiànchuán zhuāngmǎn le shànyú
To the non-native speaker, you would most likely read it as….... Wǒ de qìdiànchuán zhuāngmǎn le shànyú
You’d rush over the words in a really cursory manner. And you’d focus more on the combination of the letters rather than the actual sounds. This is BAD because when it comes to an actual conversation, you wouldn’t be able to listen or speak to anyone.
Learning the correct way to pronounce in another language is hard. It’s really important though that you learn what the words actually sounds like. Sometimes you don’t know whether you’re right or wrong, and most of the time you can’t just ask friends or family members what the correct pronunciation is.
So we developed a handy application that does that for you.
We made Ni-Howdy a Chrome extension so it can work for any website. You can go on any site you want to learn from, and Ni Howdy will tell you whether you are correctly pronouncing whatever you’re currently reading. So you highlight whatever text you want to learn, and speak into your computer what you think is the correct way to say the text.
Ni-Howdy sends your speech through Azure’s Cognitive Services and compares your pronunciation to how its supposed to be pronounced. The API’s then let you know how you’re doing, and it’ll return relevant information to the user, like percent accuracy, and words missed. After all this is done, we render some neat data visualizations for the user to see which areas they might need improvement or are doing well on.
The coolest part is we make the UI very friendly and easy to use. All the user has to do is highlight a block of words they want to learn, and start speaking, and Ni-Howdy will do the rest. After the user finishes, he can see his performance in the form of cool graphs, word clouds, etc.
Some language tools like Google Translate or Rosetta Stone might not be the most accessible or user-friendly. We’re hoping Ni-Howdy can bridge the language gap for so many people out there in a convenient and practical way.
So whether English is your first, second, or third language, we hope that everyone can come to understand and say to each other, Ni-Howdy.
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