We’ve been focusing so much on the visual lately that it seemed a sensory switch was in order. And since R&D has yet to find a way to get Pat the Bunny up onto your monitors, for today’s globally-themed post, I’ll ask you to lend me your ears instead.
Forvo bills itself as the largest pronunciation database on the web: their wonderfully ambitious tag line is “All the words in the world. Pronounced.” Their list of word and phrase pronunciations isn’t quite there yet, of course, but it’s growing daily. So if you’ve been wondering how to pronounce that Urdu or Portuguese word you came across, you can browse an alphabetical list to see if it’s there. Or you can post a request, and a native speaker can upload an audio clip of the correct pronunciation to add to the database. And if you see a word request you know how to pronounce, feel free to help out by uploading your own clip.
In a move I never would have expected in ninth grade, quizzes actually got fun when they stopped having anything to do with school. If you think you’re good with accents, try Can You Guess Where My Accent Is From?, a game on the Language Trainers Group website. They’ve filmed folks from various countries reading two lines of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” to provide a sample of their accents, and you get to guess which country each reader is from, with bonus points if you can guess the city! (I, for one, am terrible at it.) They’re also setting up new versions of the game, so if you or someone you know has a hard to place accent, and you’d like to try to stump the masses with a couple lines from Wordsworth or Dylan Thomas, you can send in a video of yourself!
Finally, as a handy reminder that foreigners aren’t the only ones with accents, urlesque has gathered a nice sampling of Non-Americans Speaking in American Accents. Some of them are excellent. Others are cringe-inducing. Either way, it’s not a bad thing to remember that sometimes we’re “them” instead of “us.”
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