Monday, April 09, 2007

For Love of the Spoken Word

JF found this really great site that gives spoken pronunciations in many different languages. All you do is type in the text that you want to hear, and this cool program will pronounce it for you, even in different accents.

For example, you type in "hello", and then chose which language you want represented. Say I choose "Japanese." Then you pick from the different voice choices in the drop down menu (in the case of Japanese, it's male or female), and then click "Say it!" Very neat.

If you wanted to try French, you have a choice of standard French, or French Canadian.

I love hearing all the rich complexities of the human voice. It's a neat way to check to see if your pronunciation in a foreign language might be slightly off. Or just as a guilty pleasure!

5 comments:

ccw said...

Does it do Appalachian?

KLee said...

Nah -- but it does more than I thought it would: Catalan, Portuguese, Dutch, Korean, Polish, Swedish, Greek....

Some of those are a little more "obscure" than I expected. :)

Bridget said...

that's pretty cool. i wish it did gaelic then i cold figure out how to pronounce all these crazy irish words. Since when does bh make a v sound?

KLee said...

Or, Bridget -- how does "Niamh" become "neev"? :)

Or how "ceilidh" becomes pronounced "kaylee"?

I could go on and on about the incomprehensible Gaelic! (I sure love the way it sounds spoken, though...) :)

Karyn said...

Ooooh! I can indulge my accent fetish! Hot damn!