Sunday, February 7, 2010

How do you say?

Finding British English dictionaries online, with pronunciation, is difficult.
However, this site is excellent.

Suppose you want to know how to pronounce a regular verb in the simple past and you don’t the rules (yes, there are SOME rules).
This is what you do:-
Type in walked and press submit.
Listen to the word which now appears, written in pink, in a list on the left.
To listen again move your mouse over the pink ‘walked’ but don’t click on it.
To hear it again move your mouse away from the word and then back over the word.
You will hear that the letter ‘l’ isn’t pronounced, that the ‘ed’ is not another syllable but a continuation of the previous syllable and that the ‘ed’ sounds like a ‘t’.

Try some words that are often pronounced incorrectly – builder, friend, fruit, chocolate, island.
How many syllables has chocolate got?

Words beginning with s, followed by certain consonants, are difficult for Spanish speakers to say well, so try these – school, stand, slow, speak. None of them start with an ‘e’ sound.

This dictionary also contains some proper names!
You can find out how to pronounce my first name, Sheila, for example.

If you’re a football fan, try listening to some football club names like Manchester United, Aston Villa and Birmingham (said in British English and American English).

The site is constantly being updated with more obscure words that might be useful for doctors, vets and dentists etc.
Here are a couple of examples: 
laparascopically 
gastrolavage
I don't know what they mean but I know how to say them!

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