Ever been in a position where you are holding forth on your favourite French, Spanish, or Russian author/artist/director, and you hesitate, because you are not sure how to pronounce their names?
You could bluff your way through, and hope that no one in your audience is going to correct you, or, you could look up Forvo, a Web 2.0 service where you can listen to the pronunciation of the word.
At the time of writing this, Forvo had 2510 pronounced words in 177 languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Marathi. Users can add words, either anonymously or with their usernames. Adding new words is easy.
However, as with all sites that rely on user generated content, Forvo is not perfect; the two most popular words in English are both what Forvo calls 'bad words', and the only two entries for Hindi, 'Mahatma Gandhi' and 'Tilaklakshmikanth(?)', are clearly fake. Still, as with other such websites, the proportion of idiots posting misleading entries should decline with time, and Forvo could end up being a really useful site.
You could bluff your way through, and hope that no one in your audience is going to correct you, or, you could look up Forvo, a Web 2.0 service where you can listen to the pronunciation of the word.
At the time of writing this, Forvo had 2510 pronounced words in 177 languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Marathi. Users can add words, either anonymously or with their usernames. Adding new words is easy.
However, as with all sites that rely on user generated content, Forvo is not perfect; the two most popular words in English are both what Forvo calls 'bad words', and the only two entries for Hindi, 'Mahatma Gandhi' and 'Tilaklakshmikanth(?)', are clearly fake. Still, as with other such websites, the proportion of idiots posting misleading entries should decline with time, and Forvo could end up being a really useful site.
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