Why I built the pronunciation visualizer

The itch

My inspiration came from my French tutor and my french grammar books. Long before lessons moved to Zoom, my tutor would gently correct me whenever I read from a textbook or spoke out loud. I was a total beginner, still learning how to pronounce individual words.

I could say vous and avez perfectly as separate words. What I didn’t know was that, read together, the sounds connect — vous‿avez.

So my teacher started making little marks in my textbook: a link to show where sounds joined, a slash to show where they didn’t. After et, for instance, the sound never carries over even when the next word starts with a vowel — et une must stay et / une, never et‿une. He’d draw a slash to mark the break.

It helped enormously. But he couldn’t annotate everything — I had to absorb the rest over time, and reproducing all those rules in my head while reading and speaking was genuinely hard.

So I went looking for a tool that would draw those marks for me. I couldn’t find one. The closest alternative was a text-to-speech service like Google Translate — you could hear the pronunciation, but you couldn’t save it and you got no visual cues. You were left relying on your ears and memory for every connecting and non-connecting sound, which is brutal given how many nuances there are.

Who it’s for

It’s aimed at beginners like I was, and at casual learners — people prepping for a movie, a wedding, a trip — who just want to be understood when they speak.

The core focus is the stuff that tripped me up: liaison, elision, and

silent letters. As an English speaker, the trap is that English does have connecting sounds — “I’m gonna” instead of “I’m going to” — but they’re optional. In French, so many of these rules are mandatory: the sounds that should connect must connect, and the letters that should be silent must stay silent.

I call getting this right speaking with the flow, because spoken French sounds deeply connected. Training your ear and mouth to catch the connecting and non-connecting sounds makes you both easier to understand and better at listening.

How I built it

Every time you paste new text, the tool draws the visual connectors right onto it — links where sounds join, slashes where they break, dimming on the letters that go silent — so you can read with the flow at a glance.

On top of that, there’s a small layer for the phonetics. If you read IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet), you get a cheat sheet for every word’s pronunciation. But not everyone reads IPA — I don’t — so I added a way to remap the symbols into something familiar: turn the IPA symbol for A into A-H, for example, and the cheat sheet speaks your language instead of a linguist’s.

Try it

Paste any French text and watch the connections, breaks, and silent letters appear.