Forvo

Every couple of days, I've taken a stack of about fifteen or twenty cards from the packet of one thousand French terms that I bought last week. Each one has the French word and the part of speech - noun, adjective - on the front, and the English translation(s) on the back. What they don't have is a guide to the pronunciation of the word. For that, I'd been using Google Translate, which is good but has a flaw in that the pronunciation sometimes appears to have been system-generated. For example, if you give it 'hat', and the system returns 'chapeau', the word might sound normal, or it might sound flat, without any inflections. I know that in French the trailing syllable, absent any cedilles or inflection marks, is pitched higher than the rest of the word; in a sentence, it's the last syllable of the last word. It's not terribly important that I get it exactly right. Still, there are some words where you think Is that really how it's supposed to sound?

Which is why I'm glad that I found Forvo: All The Words In The World. Pronounced. Forvo is a cooperative database of words and phrases in multiple languages, each pronounced by an actual person. The location of the person saying the word or phrase is given, so that you can see if chapeau is pronounced differently in, say, northern France than in the Burgundy region. (Which it might be: SHAHPOO vs SHAHPOH). They're available in MP3 format, so that you can download them. And it's free.

I like it.