For example, go to the following lesson: http://www.internetpolyglot.com/lesson-2102001130 and press any green button with white triangle on it.
Now you can hear the pronunciation of this word!!!The recording was done with an American guy, so the accent is American therefore. Also there were some decisions that we had to make and these decisions are described in the following essay that this guy has written after we finished recording:
Creation of English audio clips for Internet Polyglot We began the reading of the English words for the Internet Polyglot early in the morning when the male human voice is still deep and resonant. Using a simple uni-directional microphone plugged into a laptop which was running an audio recording and editing program, we began the task of reading and recording hundreds of words in English. Early on, we realized that when practicing English words, we don't generally use the article ("the" or "a") preceding a noun. For example, in other languages it is very important to include "the" or "a" before a word because there may be many different forms of that word depending on the gender of the noun. But in English, the articles are always the same and so we made an executive decision not to include them. However, we found that when it came to verbs, that it made more sense to include the helping word "to" before each verb. For example, "to wet" is a much better translation than simply "wet" which could be misinterpreted as a descriptive adjective. On a technical recording note, we found it difficult at first when reading words that had the hard sound "p" at the beginning without creating a Pounding sound on the recording. Holding the microphone further away to artificially soften the "p" sound changed the volume of the sound being recorded and was inconsistent with the rest of the recorded words. So each time we got to such a word, it was simply softened vocally so as to avoid this recorded unpleasant pounding sound. We also avoided having the words read so that they had any down-inflection to them. For example, if reading down a list of 30 words, it's important not to read the last word of the list as if you're finishing a sentence. For the person later listening to this individual word while studying the English lessons, it would give that particular word a strange down-inflection. We found it better to read each word as if it was the first word on the list so that they all had the same level of vocal importance. It was an honor to be the "voice of English" which will be listened to by people all over the world who are practicing their pronunciation using the brilliant program, "Internet Polyglot". |
As a side-note, this guy has his own blog which might be of an interest for many of you, here it is: http://healthyspine.blogspot.com/
