About Dictationly

Why dictation?

Dictation is one of the oldest language exercises, and one of the most honest. When you only listen, it is easy to feel you understood because you caught a few keywords. When you have to write every word, the gaps show up: the linking sounds, the weak forms, the endings you never hear, the words you know on paper but don't recognise at speed.

Ten to twenty minutes of dictation a day trains several skills at once — listening, spelling, vocabulary, grammar and concentration — and it gives you a clear, measurable picture of where you stand.

What you can do here

• Practice sentence by sentence with replay, slower speed, hints and instant word-by-word corrections.
• Choose exercises by level (A1 to C2) and by topic: daily conversation, IELTS and TOEIC listening, business, travel, numbers and spelling, news and audiobook stories.
• Click any word in a transcript to see its meaning in an English–English or English–Vietnamese dictionary.
• Paste your own text into the Dictation Generator and practice it with a computer voice.
• With a free account: keep your history, resume unfinished exercises, see the words you often miss, follow your progress on the Dashboard and appear on the Leaderboard.

Where the audio comes from

We only use material we are allowed to use. Most recordings come from openly licensed or public-domain sources — for example VOA Learning English (public domain), LibriTTS audiobook recordings and Tatoeba sentences (Creative Commons licenses). Some exercises are written by our team and voiced with high-quality text-to-speech; those are clearly labelled as a computer-generated voice.

Every exercise page shows its source, license and attribution. Each exercise is assigned a CEFR level based on vocabulary, sentence length and speaking speed, so that “Beginner” really feels like beginner.

If you are a rights holder and believe something here should not be, please write to [email protected] and we will review it promptly.

What we care about

• Free to practice. You can use every exercise without an account; an account only adds saving and statistics.
• Short and focused. No long videos, no distractions — one sentence at a time.
• Respect for your data. We collect only what we need to run the service and never sell it. Read our Privacy Policy.
• Honest feedback. Corrections show exactly what you typed against what was said, so you know what to work on.

Who we are

Dictationly is built and maintained by a small independent team in Vietnam of developers and English learners who wanted a better dictation tool for themselves. We start with English and plan to add more languages over time.

Contact

Found a mistake in a transcript, have an idea for a topic, or want to report a problem? Email us at [email protected]. We read every message and usually reply within a few working days.