The Science Behind Truespel Phonetics

by Tom Zurinskas, creator of truespel

For US English, there is a much better pronunciation guide than the “new” British Council version http://bit.ly/13MLm4P which is not English friendly.  It is far better than the "official?" US government phonetics used by the VOA  see http://justpaste.it/voaspel .  It is  truespel phonetics.

Truespel follows the criteria http://justpaste.it/truecriteria . Thus, truespel is phonics-based, using no special symbols.  It looks like English making it easily writable, allowing typical capitalization and punctuation rules, which is a first for phonetics.

Truespel phoneme spelling is based on a scientific analysis of US English phonics and spelling rules .  See the analysis of  letters of the alphabet at http://justpaste.it/aqe and the analysis of the frequencies of spellings of each sound of US English at http://justpaste.it/phonemefreq .  Both analyses are from the new perspective of counting the popularity of appearance of phonemes in text (15.4M total instances for the topo 5k words – ref truespel book 4).

Truespel is mature and free on the internet.  It can be learned by ELL’s in an hour.  The free two-way converter shows phonetics next to regular spelling where words can be clicked for definitions http://bit.ly/1Dvx4Tz .  Free tutorials are at http://justpaste.it/course2 .

In summary, popular phonetics in the USA is a hodge podge non-system.  Even newspapers and US government avoid the strange symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet see http://www.screenr.com/cbn8  . Thus the need for truespel phonetics is obvious and is outlined here http://justpaste.it/truespelnow .

For much more detail, see the links from my presentation at the 2015 Florida Literacy Coalition at http://justpaste.it/flctruespel2015