This is a command line project to help study the International Phonetic Alphabet. It uses audio files from wikipedia to randomly play audio of vowels or consonants. After pressing it will display the correct annotations. For vowels this is backness, open-ness and roundness. The wikipedia sounds do not include information on tenseness so that is not included at this time. For consonants this includes manner and place of articulation (e.g. Voiced velar plosive).

This has only been tested on a mac and requires that the machine have afplay for playing audio. You can install it if you have homebrew installed with the command brew install afplay. Displaying strings and reading input is done with the curses library to make the experience a bit more game like.

Make sure to chmod u+x quiz.py and then you can run with:

./quiz.py

Or if you prefer, don't chmod it and just:

python quiz.py

The files were downloaded from wikipedia with their original filenames which include their annotations. The IPA symbol for each phoneme was added manually to the filenames for classification purposes. The script that downloaded those files is ripper.py. Perhaps it will come in useful in the future.

The filenames are read by the script to display the annotations.

Audio files included in this project are from the Wikipedia articles:

IPA Vowel chart with audio

IPA consonant chart with audio

Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0