Better language voice resources?

[Mymar]

I didn't know how to call it, but I've been using the voice add on for anki for awhile and it's alright, I'd prefer to have real speakers voices instead of computer voices because sometimes it isn't all that greatly emulated by the computer, but it's better than nothing. Is there something better I can do? I don't have the greatest accent in the world and want to train myself to hear the words as well as recognize them in print. Is there another way of adding voice to the text besides recording it myself (which would be bad for my purposes) and the awesome tts thing?

[rdearman]

I didn't know how to call it, but I've been using the voice add on for anki for awhile and it's alright, I'd prefer to have real speakers voices instead of computer voices because sometimes it isn't all that greatly emulated by the computer, but it's better than nothing. Is there something better I can do? I don't have the greatest accent in the world and want to train myself to hear the words as well as recognize them in print. Is there another way of adding voice to the text besides recording it myself (which would be bad for my purposes) and the awesome tts thing?

TV and Movies with subtitles are your answer. You can get them on to a card with Substudy, or subs2srs.

[garyb]

For words and short phrases, Forvo has lots of recordings of real native speakers. RhinoSpike is another frequently mentioned site where you can get native speakers to record longer passages, although I've not used it myself.

[Montmorency]

I didn't know how to call it, but I've been using the voice add on for anki for awhile and it's alright, I'd prefer to have real speakers voices instead of computer voices because sometimes it isn't all that greatly emulated by the computer, but it's better than nothing. Is there something better I can do? I don't have the greatest accent in the world and want to train myself to hear the words as well as recognize them in print. Is there another way of adding voice to the text besides recording it myself (which would be bad for my purposes) and the awesome tts thing?

If you have an unabridged audiobook and e-book pair that you like, and don't mind getting your hands dirty with Audacity, you might try a bit of DIY. It shouldn't be too hard to split an e-book in text form (one can use Calibre to convert other formats) into sentences. Converting the audio to sentence files will be harder work, but it may be instructive in itself.

Or if that all sounds like too much hard work, you might just use the pair for listening-reading.