Dictation Sprint

About Dictation Sprint

Dictation Sprint is a free daily English dictation game: you hear a full sentence read aloud, then type exactly what you heard. Every day the game serves eight sentences drawn from a bank of 128 original items, two from each CEFR band — two A1 sentences of five or six easy words, two A2 sentences with past and future forms, two B1 sentences with conditionals and relative clauses, and finally two B2 sentences with inversion, passives and participle clauses. The round always starts easy and ends hard, so your ear is warm before the difficulty bites.

You control the audio. Each sentence can be played up to three times before you submit, and any of those plays can be the 🐢 Slow button, which replays the same recording at 0.65 speed without changing the pitch — ideal when fast linking blurs "a lot of" or "had I known" into one blob. Listening fewer times pays off: on a sentence where you score 80% or more, finishing after one listen adds a 20-point bonus and two listens adds 10. Once you have submitted, replays become free, so you can play the audio again and compare it with what you actually typed.

Marking is word by word, not all-or-nothing. The server lines your typing up against the real sentence and labels every word correct, wrong or missing, and it also flags extra words you invented; your score for that sentence is simply the percentage of words you got right. Capital letters, commas, full stops and hyphens are ignored, and "dont" is accepted for "don't", so you are graded on your ears, not on your typing. At the end you get a per-sentence recap with the points you earned, plus a "Words to review" list of every word you missed across the whole round, each with a 🔊 button so you can hear it again on its own.

Dictation Sprint is the single most useful exercise for learners whose reading is far ahead of their listening — a very common profile for Vietnamese students and anyone who learned English mainly from books. It trains exactly what IELTS Listening and TOEIC listening sections test, and it forces you to notice the grammar your eyes skip: plural -s, past -ed, articles, and weak forms like "of" and "have". A full round takes about five minutes. It is free, it works on a phone, there is no sign-up, and a completely new set of sentences arrives every day.

Why play Dictation Sprint?

• ✓ Trains real listening: you have to catch every word, including the weak ones learners skip such as "of", "have" and "to".
• ✓ Word-by-word marking shows precisely which words you missed instead of one pass or fail score.
• ✓ Difficulty ramps A1 → A2 → B1 → B2 inside a single round, so beginners and advanced learners both get useful items.
• ✓ The "Words to review" list is a personal problem-word list built from your own mistakes, with audio on every chip.