Reading a new script

Several of the languages Lingara teaches are written in a script most learners cannot yet read. For those, every word can carry a pronunciation guide — a romanisation, written in the Latin alphabet, of how the word sounds. This page is which languages have one, which system each uses, and the one control that turns it off.

Which languages carry one

Each language in Lingara is marked in its own metadata as requiring romanisation or not, along with the name of the system it uses. The marking is not a guess made at display time; it is a property of the language, set when the language was added, and it is what decides whether a pronunciation line appears at all.

The languages that carry a guide, and the system each uses:

• Mandarin and Traditional Chinese — pinyin, the standard system, with tone marks.
• Cantonese — jyutping.
• Hokkien — Tâi-lô, the Taiwanese Romanization System.
• Hakka — Pha̍k-fa-sṳ, in its Sixian variety.
• Japanese — romaji.
• Korean — Revised Romanization.
• Greek, Arabic and the other non-Latin scripts each carry their own established scheme; Hindi uses IAST.

Languages written in the Latin alphabet — French, German, Spanish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Swahili, Afrikaans and the rest — carry none, and that is correct rather than an omission. A romanisation of a word already written in Latin letters is the word again, and shipping it would put a second, redundant line under every item on the screen.

The four Chinese varieties are worth dwelling on, because they are the clearest case for why the system matters and not merely its presence. Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and Hakka share a script and do not share a pronunciation; the same character is read four different ways. Pinyin under a Cantonese word would not be slightly wrong, it would be a different language’s sound. Each of the four therefore carries the system its own learners actually use.

The one control

The setting is called Show pronunciation, and it lives in the app’s language settings. Its description is exact about its reach: romanisation and phonetic guides in lessons and vocabulary. Turning it off removes the guide line everywhere the app shows words — exercise prompts, vocabulary lists, flashcards — and turning it back on restores it. Nothing is regenerated and nothing is lost; the guide is part of the word’s data and is simply not drawn.

There is a second, narrower control on a lesson plan itself: Pronunciation, which shows or hides romanised pronunciation in this lesson plan only. It starts from the app-wide default, and its own description says where that default lives. The two exist because the app-wide setting is a preference and the per-plan one is a moment — you are usually a reader who wants the guide, and occasionally a reader working through one text who does not.

When to turn it off

The guide is genuinely useful and it is genuinely a crutch, and which of those it is depends entirely on how far along you are.

Early on, leave it on. You cannot practise vocabulary you cannot pronounce, and reading a word you have no sound for is memorising a shape. The guide is what lets a first week in Mandarin or Japanese be about words rather than about glyphs.

Turn it off once you are decoding, not before. The moment to try is when you notice you have started reading the romanisation instead of the script — your eye goes to the Latin line first and the characters have become decoration. That is the point at which the guide has stopped helping and started standing in for the skill it was supposed to bootstrap. Turning it off is uncomfortable for about two sessions and then it is not.

Turn it back on without ceremony. Moving to a harder level, or to a text with unfamiliar characters, is a perfectly good reason to switch it on again for a while. It is a setting, not a commitment, and the per-plan control exists precisely so that one difficult text does not require changing your default.

A useful middle position for flashcards specifically: turn the guide off and grade yourself on whether you could produce the sound before you check. Because a flashcard’s interval and ease factor are computed from how you grade it, “I recognised the shape” and “I could say it” produce very different schedules for the same card — see how reviews are scheduled. Grading on recognition alone builds a deck of words you can spot and not say.

Tone marks and what they cost

For the tonal languages the guide is not only a pronunciation, it is the tone. Pinyin mā, má, mǎ and mà are four different words, and a guide stripped of its diacritics would be actively misleading rather than merely less useful. Lingara keeps the marks.

This is worth knowing when you copy a word out of the app to look it up somewhere else: the diacritics travel with it, and some dictionaries prefer tone numbers to tone marks. That is a property of the dictionary, not a mismatch in what you were shown.

What the guide is not

A romanisation is a bridge, not a spelling. No system captures every distinction a native reader hears, all of them make compromises, and several of the ones above have rival schemes that the learner communities argue about with feeling. Lingara picks one per language and stays consistent, because a learner who has internalised one system and then meets another mid-course gains nothing and loses their footing.

If a specific word’s guide looks wrong, it probably is — report it from the in-app feedback path on the item, which attaches the word so nobody has to guess which one you meant, or email support@getlingara.com.