PRONOUNCE IT RIGHT INSPANISH!
Globe-Gate learning object


Are you puzzled about how to pronounce the words and sentences in your Spanish book, or how you might pronounce a sentence you compose yourself?  Here is how to solve those problems. To begin, if you are using Dos Mundos (what we use at UTMartin) you can get pronunciation of all your chapter vocabulary by clicking here.  For general and a number of specific strategies in pronunciation, here is an online essay. There are other web presentations.

    Learn Spanish Pronunciation
    http://spanish.about.com/od/spanishpronunciation/Learn_Spanish_Pronunciation.htm

    Spanish Pronunciation Key
    http://www.tomzap.com/sp_key.html

    Spanish Pronunciation Lessons
    http://www.elearnspanishlanguage.com/pronunciation/pronunciationindex.html


In addition, there are dictionaries with audio output in Spanish:

    Spanish Audio Dictionary (with audio)
    http://www.elearnspanishlanguage.com/pronunciation/audiodictionary.html

    Spanish Dict (with audio)
    http://www.spanishdict.com/

    WordReference.com English-Spanish-English Dictionary
    http://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=audio

Most impressive and helpful about the web is a small collection of "text-to-speech" applications, created by companies that are revolutionizing business communications. Make a setting for Spanish (sometimes a choice between Latin America and Spain), type in your word, sentence, sometimes even a small paragraph, click on the button, and you will hear what you typed in reasonably good Spanish.  Here are the most consistantly functional links:

    AT&T Research Text-To-Speech (TTS)
    http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

    Demo Cepstral Voices
    http://www.cepstral.com/demos/

    Oddcast TTS demo (with SitePal)
    http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php?sitepal

    Text-to-speech
    http://text-to-speech-translator.paralink.com/

    Voice Reader Online (Linguatec, with sitepal, quite good)
    http://www.linguatec.net/onlineservices/voice_reader/site

    WebSphere Voice (French, Spanish, German, sounds a bit primitive)
    http://www-306.ibm.com/software/pervasive/tech/demos/tts.shtml


Some solutions are simply part of the French phonetic system. Here is short online phonetics courses:

    Phonetics - The Sounds of Spoken English and Spanish
    http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/

    Spanish Phonetics
    http://liceu.uab.es/~joaquim/phonetics/spanish_contents.html

Finally, the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at UTMartin is currently using Wimba Voice Tools, which are launched from Blackboard. This will allow you to make recordings of your voice from various online positions (email, voiceboard, etc). It is extremel easy to use. You just need your computer's built-in mic or one you can plug in.  Wimba more than replaces what used to be done by a tape recorder.


Globe-Gate Intercultural Web Project
Made in Tennessee to bring you the world
TennesseeBob Peckham, Director
bobp@utm.edu

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