OU blog

Personal Blogs

A few years ago

Pronounciation

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by David McColl, Friday, 6 Apr 2012, 17:04

Since my tutor mentioned my poor pronunciation I have been looking into sources of help and assistance. Clearly the tutorials are the main OU resources, but they are so badly attended and I find Elluminate difficult. I have been investigating other options.

One source is the IPA, those funny little letters in the dictionary that most people ignore. These are two easily similar words :

schön [ʃø:n] Adj. - beautiful
schon [ʃo:n] Adv. - already.

Another route is to find where these words are spoken, digitally on the web. The DWDS (deh vey deh es) site often has a button that speaks the word being looked up, but that is difficult to download being Flash based. It can be recorded via Audacity and then downloaded but what a fuss.

One site specialising in pronounciation is www.forvo.com . You can register and download an MP3 file recorded by native speakers. They even show you a map of where the speaker comes from. The site is prone to being down sadly, but when it works it really works.

I use a combination of these two adding them to my ANKI flashcards. DWDS uses the article which Forvo does not.

Dave

[500]

Permalink
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 135829