Inspiration
Immigrating from India, learning English had its challenges. The biggest one of them all was pronunciation of words. Fast forward to present day, I teach Hispanic kids who don't speak English very well. Fueled by my personal experience and a desire to help these kids, I built this app.
What it does
When a user searches a word, the app checks if it is in the local database. If it is, the app breaks down the word into its phonemes and presents it to the user as clickable buttons. Clicking these buttons plays the phoneme sound which users can listen to, to help them pronounce the word. There are a few other screens that allow for individual phoneme practice.
How I built it
I built this app using React and its libraries. The backend is a Firebase database.
Challenges I ran into
One challenge I ran into was integrating the Firebase backend with the React front-end. I had to do some research on how the two technologies can fit together to solve this issue.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I showed this app to my students and they used it during a session. At the end of the session, they had learned more words than they had in any previous session. This translated to an average increase in a letter grade at school!
What I learned
I learned a lot about phonemes and the English language in general. This is my most complex React project yet. I brought together many technologies for this app.
What's next for Word Phoneme App
Next, I will add a picture feature so that users can take photos of unfamiliar words and learn how to pronounce them.
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