Forvo: the pronunciation guide
Thanks to the great Mashable blog, I’ve come across Forvo, which describes itself as “All the words in the world. Pronounced.” Well…they don’t quite have ALL the words yet, but they are off to a pretty good start. In just about 7 months, the site has collected over 67,000 pronunciations of over 127,000 words in 198 languages. All of the words are pronounced by native speakers of that language.
The languages range from the most common on the site, English, with over 17,000 words pronounced to many languages with only 1 word pronounced, most of which I’ve never heard of. Do you need to know how to pronounce gjoub in Ndonga or desu in Mongolian? Then Forvo is the place to go.
The pronunciations I tried all sounded very good. I could definitely see this being used by teachers of students learning English as a second language or by anyone learning a new language. This could also be used by an exchange student to learn certain words they come across in their readings.
Registration for the site is free, but is not necessary if you simply want to browse and listen to pronunciations. If, however, you’d like to contribute to the site, the one page registration is dead simple. Also, as a member of the site, you can keep track of the pronunciations you’ve listened to and download them as mp3 files for offline use.
Check it out at http://forvo.com.
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Hey, just so you are aware your link to desu is a link to the word in Japanese not Mongolian. I mean, it's a Japanese word. A pretty important one at that!
Foreign Language student, Thanks for the feedback. If you click on the link for that word in my post, down at the bottom of the page there is also a Mongolian pronunciation of the word. It's probably the same japanese word with just a Mongolian twist to it.
You're right, I see that at the bottom. However it looks like that user pronounced the word twice on that page, registering one in Japanese and one in Mongolian. But it's the same which leads me to believe that the Mongolian entry was a mistake on her part. I guess there are no Mongolian users to correct it! More comments on my post Livemocha foreign-language learning website.