An English pronunciation test answers a narrower and more useful question than "how good is my English?": which sounds are listeners actually tripping over? Most learners already know they have an accent. What they do not know is that it usually comes down to a handful of specific sounds, and that fixing two or three of them changes how easily people understand them.
This guide explains what a scored English test measures, how to read a score out of 100, which sounds cost learners the most, and what to practise for each. You can try the five test words right here, and the free English pronunciation test takes about a minute in your browser, with no account.
Short on time? Take the free English pronunciation test: five words, a score for each, and your weakest sound named.
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think
Touch the bottom edge of your top teeth with your tongue tip and let the air flow over it. No voice, and the tongue never taps.
to use your mind
Tap to record
Why your own ear is a bad judge
Your first language decides which differences your ear has learned to notice. If your language has one "i" vowel, then ship and sheep sound like two versions of the same word, and you will say them the same way without hearing a problem. The same goes for v and w, r and l, or the th of think and the s of sink.
Listeners make it worse by being kind. In conversation, context repairs most errors, so people rarely stop you. A sound can be wrong for years without anyone mentioning it. A test does not use context, so it hears exactly what you said.
It also helps to separate two ideas. An accent is not an error. Plenty of people speak clear English with a Spanish, Indian or French accent. A pronunciation test does not try to make you sound like a newsreader; it checks whether each sound you produce is the sound an English listener expects, which is what decides whether you are understood.
How a scored English test works
The TonePerfect test uses five words chosen to cover the sounds most learners struggle with:
- think: the quiet th
- really: r and l in one short word
- ship: the short "i" vowel (not the long "ee" of sheep)
- very: a clean v, not w or b
- world: an r-coloured vowel and the "-rld" cluster at the end
You record one word at a time, and each word gets one score out of 100 as soon as you finish it. At the end, your five words are ranked from weakest to strongest, and the weakest is named together with the sound it was chosen to test. The five-word test stops at the word: it does not show a separate score for each sound inside it. For that level of detail, the TonePerfect app scores every sound in every word you practise, and the English practice page does the same for any text you paste. The reference is standard American English. Four of the five words sound essentially the same in standard British English; world is scored against the American r-coloured vowel, so a British world without the r may score a little lower. That is a difference of accent, not an error.
The practice page also names the weakest sound, which makes it the natural next step after the test.
What your score means
The English test reads its 0–100 scores in three bands:
| Score | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| 85 and above | A sound native listeners will not notice |
| 70–84 | Clearly understood but audibly non-native: a vowel slightly off or a consonant a little weak |
| Below 70 | Probably heard as a different sound, e.g. "sink" for "think" |
Two rules make the numbers useful:
- Look for the outlier. Most learners have one or two sounds well below the rest. Those are the sounds to work on; the others can be left alone.
- Re-record before you believe a surprise. A noisy room or a very quiet microphone lowers a single take. If one score looks wrong, record that word again somewhere quiet.
The sounds that cost learners the most
The two "th" sounds
English has a quiet th (think, three) and a buzzing th (this, mother). Very few languages have either, so learners swap in s, t, f, z or d. The fix is physical: the tongue tip touches the bottom edge of the top teeth and the air flows over it, with no tap.
r and l
The English r touches nothing: the tongue curls back or bunches up and never taps the roof of the mouth. The l does touch, on the ridge just behind the top teeth. Speakers of Japanese and Korean (and of Cantonese) often merge them; speakers of Spanish, French or German bring their own r.
Short and long vowels
ship/sheep, full/fool, bed/bad: English has vowel pairs that many languages treat as one. The short i is short and relaxed, with the tongue a little lower than for the long ee. Do not smile and stretch it. The vowel in cat is another frequent casualty.
v, w and b
Top teeth on the lower lip for v; rounded lips and no teeth for w. Spanish speakers often say b, German speakers often say v for w, and Hindi speakers often blend the two.
Stress, schwa and word endings
English shrinks unstressed vowels into a quick "uh", the schwa in about and camera. Saying every vowel at full length is one of the strongest accent markers. At the end of words, consonant clusters such as -rld, -sts or -ked are easy to lose or to break up with an extra vowel.
How to improve each kind of weak sound
| If this scores lowest | Do this |
|---|---|
| th | Exaggerate the tongue between the teeth, say "th-th-think" slowly, then speed up. Pair it with the sound you substitute: sink/think, day/they. |
| r or l | Alternate slowly: "la-ra-la-ra". Feel the contact for l, and no contact for r. Then say really, rule, world. |
| Vowel pairs | Train your ear first with pairs: ship/sheep, full/fool. If you cannot hear the difference yet, repeating will not fix it. |
| v / w / b | Look in a mirror: teeth visible on the lip for v, lips rounded for w. Then very well, vine/wine. |
| Endings | Slow the word down and say every consonant: wor-l-d. Do not add a vowel after it. |
Each sound has its own page with the mouth position and audio: see all English sounds and the English pronunciation guides.
Pronunciation test, accent test or checker?
People search for all three, and they are the same engine asking slightly different questions. The pronunciation test is the diagnostic: which sounds are wrong. The English accent test frames the same five-word result as one picture of how you come across. And if you searched for a checker, the English pronunciation checker runs the same scoring. Start with the test, then use the others to track progress.
What a test cannot tell you
A test scores the words it asked for. It does not judge grammar, word choice or how natural your intonation sounds across a long sentence, and it does not grade which accent you have. Use it to find and fix specific sounds, and use real conversation for everything else.
Take the test, then fix one sound
Take the free English pronunciation test, note the word that ranked lowest and spend a week on its sound alone. Then take it again and see if the ranking changes. The TonePerfect app has a lesson and practice words for every English sound, and it scores every take the same way, so your weakest sound becomes your daily drill.
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