How does TonePerfect score pronunciation?
TonePerfect aligns your recording with the text you were asked to say and scores the whole recording, each word and each individual sound inside each word, from 0 to 100.
Last checked
You always read a known text: a prompt in a test or lesson, or a word or sentence you type yourself. The scores describe how you said that text.
A sound is a phoneme in Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, French, German, Russian and Korean, and a mora in Japanese. In Mandarin, every syllable also gets its own tone score, kept separate from the scores for its initial (the consonant) and its final (the vowel part).
The per-sound scores are shown to you as numbers. The app also uses them to rank your sounds weakest-first and to pick what you practise next. In Mandarin and English it also flags the sounds that stay weak across many recordings as chronically weak; in the other six languages it shows and ranks the per-sound scores without making that call.
What it does not do
- It does not return a transcript of what you said.
- It does not tell you which sound it thought you said instead of the expected one. The exception is Mandarin tones, where it shows which tone it heard.
- It does not give an exam grade, or a CEFR, HSK, JLPT or TOPIK level.
- It does not score sentence intonation, sentence stress or Japanese pitch accent.