Pronunciation crowd: I've been doing some serious thinking lately and come to realize that it might be a good idea to tackle the whole approach to pronunciation from the obvious standpoint. Since we have agreed to start from scratch... why not pretend we are kids and learn like kids? This American website was designed to teach children how to read but I suppose some of you could make the most of it by simply focussing on the vowel sounds. Click on "Zac the rat", for instance, and listen to the vowel there. You can click on "the" and listen to the schwa.
Those of you that like technology may enjoy the brand new Google App "Google Translate", available for all kinds of cellphones and free of charge. It is practical, a lot of fun and can truly help you with your pronunciation. This software is far from perfect but has an interesting feature. although it may be incapable of recognizing a well pronounced word in isolation it will identify that same word in an appropriate context. Magic? Not really. That's how children learn languages. The video below shows a short demo. Enjoy.
