phonicsapp_android

Phonics — Pronunciation Trainer for Adults (Android)

A native Android (Jetpack Compose, Material 3) app that helps adults learn English pronunciation and phonics. Tap any sound, word, rule, or sentence to hear it spoken in a British or American accent — fully offline. This is the Android mirror of the iOS Phonics Pronunciation Coach, feature-for-feature.

Features

• Learn — the full phonics curriculum: consonants, short & long vowels, digraphs, blends, vowel teams, diphthongs, r-controlled vowels, and soft c/g. Every phoneme has IPA, a plain-language articulation cue, example words, and one-tap voice-over.
• Practice — graded speaking sessions:
  • Intonation & Emotion — hear one sentence spoken happy, sad, angry, excited, as a question, and more. Pitch, pace, and stress are reshaped per emotion so learners hear how intonation carries meaning.
  • Minimal pairs (ship/sheep), tongue twisters, short everyday messages, and sentence drills.
• Rules — the exception/irregular spellings phonics can't predict: silent letters, the many sounds of ough, soft c/g, i-before-e, tricky sight words, the schwa, and doubling/drop-e.
• Accent + voice — switch between 🇬🇧 British (en-GB) and 🇺🇸 American (en-US) anywhere, and pick a female or male voice in Settings; choices are persisted.
• Feedback — send a note straight to the team via WhatsApp.
• About — app info, developer, learning reference, audio attribution, and version.

Voice-over

• Words — example words, minimal pairs, and rule examples play real human recordings sourced from Wiktionary / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA), bundled for offline use (app/src/main/assets/word_audio, 253 clips), with an Android TTS fallback for any word without a recording.
• Phoneme sounds — "Hear the sound" demonstrates a phoneme via the on-device TextToSpeech engine fed a hidden pseudo-word cue tuned per sound (e.g. /iː/ → "ee", /eɪ/ → "ai") so the engine produces the isolated sound as closely as it can.
• Intonation & Emotion — emotion presets reshape the utterance's speech rate, pitch, volume, delay, and punctuation so the synthesizer applies real rising/falling prosody.

Audio attribution is shown in the in-app About tab as required by the CC BY-SA license.

Project structure

app/src/main/java/com/tertiaryinfotech/phonics/
  MainActivity.kt           App entry
  data/                     Models (Phoneme, ExceptionRule, Emotion, PracticeKind) + ContentLibrary
  speech/Speaker.kt         Android TTS + MediaPlayer (human word recordings, accent fallback)
  ui/                       Theme, Components, Root tab nav, Learn, Practice, Rules,
                            Feedback, About, Settings screens (Jetpack Compose, Material 3)
app/src/main/assets/word_audio/   253 bundled human pronunciation clips (m4a)

Build & run

./gradlew :app:assembleDebug        # debug APK
./gradlew :app:bundleRelease        # signed release AAB (needs keystore.properties)

• Min SDK: 26 (Android 8.0) · Target SDK: 36 · UI: Jetpack Compose, Material 3
• Release signing reads keystore.properties (not committed) pointing at your upload keystore.

Reference

Curriculum structure follows standard synthetic-phonics practice — see Phonics (Wikipedia).

Developer

Tertiary Infotech Academy Pte Ltd