A language learners’ forum

Other than forvo.com, what tools do you use to get the pronunciation of specific words on-line?

Most dictionary sites have English or tools like Lingvosoft have a machine-generated sound that I can't feel is useful.

I also use shtooka, generally the audio quality is better but forvo has a lot more words. For more than just single words, I used to use Rhinospike, but now I use LingQ to get recordings done.

Google Translate has an audio button to hear what you just translated. I can't say how the quality is, but it's convenient.

What I've used (and use) are these:

1) http://www.ivona.com/
2) http://www.acapela-group.com/voices/demo/
3) http://www.nuance.com/landing-pages/pla ... ?demo=true

Just write whatever you want, press "record computer playback" on Audacity -at the right of the little mic- and press play on Ivona/Acapela/Nuance. Then you'll have a free sample on how to pronnounce many phrases, words and difficult sounds.

Gabriel Wyner also mentions these two sites, to hire (paid) freelancers to pronounce for you:
https://www.fiverr.com/
https://www.elance.com/
I have never tried them. Have you?

astromule wrote:Gabriel Wyner also mentions these two sites, to hire (paid) freelancers to pronounce for you:
https://www.fiverr.com/
https://www.elance.com/
I have never tried them. Have you?

I've never tried fivver. But I think if you want audio recording it would probably be the better choice of the two. As a freelancing Elance is more complicated as you have to set up a job and have a bidding process etc. However, I have used Elance for bigger or more unusual language learning related tasks. I've used it to get transcriptions, and to have specific grammar exercises created. Although do note, it is being closed down soon after a merger with odesk, the new site being upwork.com.

CarlyD wrote:Google Translate has an audio button to hear what you just translated. I can't say how the quality is, but it's convenient.

But not for most languages, I wish they did have one for Hebrew.

astromule wrote:What I've used (and use) are these:

1) http://www.ivona.com/
2) http://www.acapela-group.com/voices/demo/
3) http://www.nuance.com/landing-pages/pla ... ?demo=true

Just write whatever you want, press "record computer playback" on Audacity -at the right of the little mic- and press play on Ivona/Acapela/Nuance. Then you'll have a free sample on how to pronnounce many phrases, words and difficult sounds.

Gabriel Wyner also mentions these two sites, to hire (paid) freelancers to pronounce for you:
https://www.fiverr.com/
https://www.elance.com/
I have never tried them. Have you?

Excellent resources. The ivona packages are available at the moment for Android, and I switched my default speech reader to use that. It sounds better than the google default one. At least for Italian and French. Works well with FBReader also.

I always seem to have better luck with language-specific sites for minority and lesser studied languages.

This dictionary has been a great resource for Ojibwe:ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/

I have another for Piedmontese, but don't have the link handy.

R.
==

The TTS+ Plugin for Ivona/Fbreader is just for Android, right? That is, you can't read directly from FBreader on Windows, can you?

rdearman wrote:Excellent resources. The ivona packages are available at the moment for Android, and I switched my default speech reader to use that. It sounds better than the google default one. At least for Italian and French. Works well with FBReader also.

astromule wrote:The TTS+ Plugin for Ivona/Fbreader is just for Android, right? That is, you can't read directly from FBreader on Windows, can you?

rdearman wrote:Excellent resources. The ivona packages are available at the moment for Android, and I switched my default speech reader to use that. It sounds better than the google default one. At least for Italian and French. Works well with FBReader also.

No is is specifically for Android. But if you have an Android tablet then you can use it to read to you. I'm not sure about speech support on windows.