May

16

Read the Words

Filed Under English, French | Leave a Comment

Read the Words is a website that does just what it says, it reads the words. You can take any written text, whether a Word document or a website, upload it or give Read the Words the URL, and it will give you an MP3 of that text being read.

The reading is, admittedly, kind of clunky. I tried two different voices, and while the male (Michael) was better than the female (Allison) both sounded mechanical. The first voice I tried was Allison, and she seemed too fast. The site lets you slow down or increase up the speed of recordings to suit your taste.

One thing I noticed in the readings is that punctuation counts. If you’re going to use abbreviations, you need to make sure the periods are in the right places.  Mr Smith is not said the same way as Mr. Smith.  This can be confusing if the author of your document has been sloppy with their punctuation. It might also make a product like Dr Pepper sound funny since there is no period after the first R.

The readings are NOT hard to understand despite the mechanical tone. For students who have trouble reading large amounts of text, this could be a valuable tool. The site can also read French and Spanish in addition to English, but I’m not sure how well that would work. This is a neat and potentially very useful site.

Apr

28

“All the words of the world. Pronounced.”

Filed Under English, French | 1 Comment

Forvo has the potential to be a really cool and extremely useful site. The objective of this site is to be able to give you the correct pronounciation of all the world’s words. If they can achieve even half of this, Forvo would become a tremendous resource for people learning a second language, or for picking up obscure words in your own language. After all, who really knows how to pronouce all those weird words in your average Shakespeare play?

Unfortunately, at the time of writing this Forvo had less than 14,000 words in 181 languages in its database. This means the chance of finding the word you want is fairly slim. However, don’t despair. There is a provision to ask for new words to be pronounced, and there even seems to be a way to join and offer pronounciations yourself. It’s kind of a Wikipedia for pronounciations, I suppose.

If it lasts, Forvo will become one of the coolest language resources on the Internet.

Apr

7

Why learn another language?

Filed Under French | Leave a Comment

Okay, it’s a bit corny, and it’s kind of cutesy, but if you want a reason to learn a second language, this video gives you a gem. It’s funny how a few images can communicate a message at least as clearly as a thousand words. That of course, explains the old expression, doesn’t it?

Jan

11

WikiJunior: Online Texts

Filed Under Collaboration, French, General, Geography, Math, Science, Social Studies | Leave a Comment

WikiJunior is an impressive little site that aims to be online textbooks for classrooms that don’t have them, or don’t want them. It’s written at a much lower level than everyone’s favorite wiki, Wikipedia. This makes it suitable for much younger readers, possible those in junior high.

WikiJunior boasts a dozen “titles” that cover several different subject and an initial look at them suggests to me that the material here is at least as good as many textbooks I’ve seen. Because wikis are built collaboratively, not everything is covered. The topics that have been worked on are those that someone or other found interesting and so chose to do. However, if what you want your students to learn about isn’t there yet, the solution is an easy one: contribute to this wiki yourself.

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