What is the 44-sound map, and what does 'due for review' mean on it?

English is usually described as having around 44 distinct sounds — consonants, vowels, and diphthongs — and sayit tracks your mastery of each one individually, built from the words you've actually recorded rather than a one-off placement quiz. A sound counted as mastered has shown up correct enough, often enough, in your real practice; a sound that's still shaky is what "due for review" is pointing you back toward.

30-second version: Your Learning path shows a sound mastery view, per phoneme, built from your practice history — mastered sounds are marked apart from ones that need more work. The same sound chart lives in Phonics, where every phoneme has its own articulation page. Sounds that keep coming up as errors get pulled into your flashcard decks automatically, which is what "due" actually means: not a countdown, but a sound the spaced-repetition queue has decided it's time to test again.

Where does my mastery on each sound actually come from?

Your own recordings, accumulated over time — not a single diagnostic test. Every take you record contributes phoneme-level evidence: which sounds you produced correctly and which ones were flagged. Mastery is a rolling read on that evidence per sound, so a sound you consistently nail across many takes reads differently from one you got right once by chance. That's also why it updates as you keep practicing, rather than being fixed after an initial assessment.

What counts as "mastered"?

A sound crossing a real accuracy threshold based on your practice history — roughly, sounds you've consistently produced correctly enough of the time read as mastered, while the rest are marked as needing more focus. It's a threshold on evidence, not a badge for effort; a sound you've practiced a lot but still get wrong regularly doesn't cross it just because you've tried it often.

What does "due" mean if this isn't a fixed schedule like flashcards?

It connects to sayit's flashcard system directly. Sounds that keep showing up as errors across your practice get pulled into dedicated decks — a deck built specifically around a sound you're struggling with, seeded with words that contain it — and those cards follow the same spaced-repetition scheduling as any other flashcard: due today, due in a few days, due next week, based on how reliably you've been getting them right. "Due for review" on a sound means the scheduling algorithm has decided it's time to test that sound again, not that you're behind on some fixed checklist.

Is the 44-sound map the same as the Phonics sound chart?

They're the same underlying inventory, viewed two different ways. The Phonics sound chart is the reference view — every consonant, vowel, and diphthong with its own articulation detail and example words, useful for looking a sound up directly. The mastery map is the progress view of that same inventory, built from your actual performance rather than being a static reference.

The 44-sound system at a glance

Why track 44 separate numbers instead of one overall pronunciation score?

Because a single overall score can hide a specific, fixable pattern. Two learners can land on the same overall accuracy while one is struggling broadly and the other has one or two consistently weak sounds dragging an otherwise strong take down — the second learner has a much faster fix available, and the sound-by-sound map is what makes that visible instead of averaged away.

Try it

Check your Learning path in sayit to see your current sound mastery, and open Phonics to look up any specific sound's articulation detail directly. If a sound keeps coming up flagged, it will start showing up in your flashcard decks on its own.