26. A method according to claim 14, wherein subpart (d) of the method further includes providing an indication of how closely the input speech matches the words in the vocabulary of recognizable words, and if a specific pronunciation problem is present, assists a speaker of the input speech in correcting a pronunciation problem.
14. A method of language independent speech recognition comprising: a. receiving input speech with a speech pre-processor and producing a speech-related signal representative of the input speech; b. representing in a database of acoustic hidden Markov models, subword units in each of a plurality of languages, wherein any subword unit that is common to two or more of the plurality of languages is represented by a single common acoustic hidden Markov model; c. characterizing in a language model a vocabulary of recognizable words and a set of grammar rules; and d. comparing in a speech recognizer the speech-related signal to the acoustic hidden Markov models and the language model, and recognizing the input speech as a specific word sequence of at least one word.