Audio pronunciation sites

[Bjorn]

Bluestacks is an Android simulator for PC and Mac.
Just tried it a bit, so far seems to work.

http://www.bluestacks.com/

[Kamlari]

WWJDIC: Online Japanese Dictionary Service
http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1C

[garyb]

If I just want to know the pronunciation of a particular word, the IPA in a dictionary is usually enough. If I really want to hear it, for example for practising pronunciation of an awkward word by listening and repeating, I'll go to Forvo. Of course this is just for the super-popular languages that I study, so I'm lucky that good dictionaries and recordings are easy enough to find.

[Kazumi]

If I just want to know the pronunciation of a particular word, the IPA in a dictionary is usually enough. If I really want to hear it, for example for practising pronunciation of an awkward word by listening and repeating, I'll go to Forvo. Of course this is just for the super-popular languages that I study, so I'm lucky that good dictionaries and recordings are easy enough to find.

Usually IPA is enough for me too. I think Forvo offers a variety of languages and covers the most popular languages; however, for less popular languages, they unfortunately don't provide very simple words I would need as even A1 level. So, hopefully the corpora will grow over there.

Having that said, Forvo seems to be still the best for multilingual website that provides audio.

Yesterday I was about to send an extensive list covering some languages, but after pressing review, I couldn't go back to what I wrote. What a pity. (I didn't read about Rdearman's warning...)

So, here I am again.

I will just leave few links for random languages.

Khmer
http://kheng.info/
It has only 3000 recordings, but still useful.

German
http://www.dict.cc/
http://en.langenscheidt.com/
http://de.pons.com/

Sometimes I like to have fun with this one:
http://www.bildwoerterbuch.com/
Just click on the theme and keep going. You will find the audio which will appear in a new tab. That’s the annoying part, but still interesting.

Some other options that I dislike, but some of you might find useful:
http://www.woerterbuch.info/
http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_de.html

Mandarin
http://ce.linedict.com/dict.html#/cnen/home
http://www.archchinese.com/chinese_english_dictionary.html
http://www.hanzicraft.com/
http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/chinese-dictionary.php

If there is anyone learning Chinese through Bopomofo, you can use the websites below:
http://www.zdic.net/
http://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/
http://stroke-order.learningweb.moe.edu.tw/symbolStrokeQuery.do

To check what are the possible combination of consonants and vowels in Mandarin (pinyin):
I just used it for one week in order to be able to understand what the syllables and tones mean in any online dictionary.
https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-pinyin-chart.php
http://www.lost-theory.org/chinese/phonetics/
http://www.shuifeng.net/Dic/Html/Index.htm

To convert Chinese characters into Pinyin:
http://www.cozychinese.com/convert/
http://www.words-chinese.com/pinyin-converter/
http://mandarinspot.com/annotate
http://www.pin1yin1.com/

There are many ways to figure out how to pronounce specific words in Chinese. It basically depends on whether you have studied and mastered any kind of transliteration or not.

Cantonese
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/
You can look for individual characters with its corresponding tones.

Spanish
I don’t use them, but I will leave some links here:
http://www.spanishdict.com/
http://es.thefreedictionary.com/

French
http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais
http://fr.thefreedictionary.com/

Portuguese
http://www.infopedia.pt/dicionarios/lingua-portuguesa
It doesn’t provide an audio file, but the word’s transcription.

Italian
http://www.vocabolaudio.com/

English
I usually use either Oxford or Cambridge’s dictionary, though sometimes I like to vary just to see other sample sentences.

They are useful to compare the American and the British pronunciation.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/
http://www.ldoceonline.com/
http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/
http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us
http://dictionary.reference.com/

https://wordnik.com/
Not that practical, but you can use the ‘hear’ button. The first audio link seems to be working.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/
Urban dictionary sometimes provides pronunciation of some slangs and other words or expressions used in informal context. Unfortunately many people have been trolling by posting weird recordings as their main sport, but sometimes it helps me to figure out how to pronounce things just out of curiosity.

Multilingual
http://www.wordreference.com/
I don’t use this website, but it provides some audio for few languages. For the ones I have checked, they also provide transcription.

http://www.bing.com/translator/
Has anyone used this website?

[rdearman]

Wow. Amazing set of resources! Thanks. Sorry about your earlier post.

[zatris]

For Italian I found the Dizionario d'ortografia e di pronunzia very useful.

[Zireael]

I've been using Acapela for my Arabic - I love the fact that you can pick the voices. Does Ivona have that feature too? Last I heard, she had only feminine voices, true to the name - and I can't hear those very well

[sctroyenne]

I'll add some resources for Irish:

Pronunciation database which looks like got integrated into the updated online dictionary site by Foras na Gaeilge (and it looks like they're making an app!).

Fuaimeanna na Gaeilge an amazing searchable database of phonemes across dialects.

And a good basic introductory lesson on the sounds and spellings of Irish.

[galaxyrocker]

I'll add some resources for Irish:

Pronunciation database which looks like got integrated into the updated online dictionary site by Foras na Gaeilge (and it looks like they're making an app!).

Fuaimeanna na Gaeilge an amazing searchable database of phonemes across dialects.

And a good basic introductory lesson on the sounds and spellings of Irish.

Just make sure to read the comments on the introductory lesson. It's great (and a lot better than most non-natives), but it's not quite native level pronunciation. They were talking about that over at ILF.

Otherwise, they're very good resources, especially Fuaimeanna(í) na Gaeilge.

[pir]

I've been using Acapela for my Arabic - I love the fact that you can pick the voices. Does Ivona have that feature too? Last I heard, she had only feminine voices, true to the name - and I can't hear those very well

For most languages Ivona has at least one female and one male speaker. Romanian and Swedish only have a female speaker (there were a couple of others like that, but those were the ones I was interested in). If I recall correctly, they don't have any Arabic at all though.