Re:Show HN: Open-source early-reading reader with phonics help
by zoozla on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:42AM
(#50161788)
Thanks for pointing these things out, although dangerous is probably overstating it a bit. The points you mentioned at are easily fixable - there are few missing phonemes that I haven't recorded, the voice can be changed from British (it's actually Australian) to US in the settings, and the word no is often taught as a sight word because it comes much earlier than the full "o" sound, but you can tweak which words are treated as "tricky" in the settings as well.
Re:Show HN: Open-source early-reading reader with phonics help
by Alez007 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:56AM
(#50163177)
Agreed, I was excited about the prospect of this but it seems rushed. It's got potential but I wouldn't show it to my child in this state.
A language selector would be useful there as it's confusing for me (living in UK).
It also seems to mix up American and British English pronunciation between the phoneme and word forms a lot, for example in the word "class" which uses American phonemes but uses the British word pronunciation.
It sometimes cheats by declaring a word 'difficult'. For example word "no" is declared difficult, which the average learner is probably pretty practiced in saying. It's just not using the same phoneme as the all the other 'o' phonemes on the website.
I'm sure its made with best intentions, but the foundation on which the app is built / prompted is incorrect. Please don't use this to teach children. Use proper material made by educators, acclaimed authors and experts.