Forvo

One of the sites that I really like to use with this French study deal is Forvo. It's designed so that people who actually speak a language -- usually, native speakers -- will pronounce and record words that have been requested. Over time, a pretty impressive corpus of words have been recorded. If I'm looking at a word, and not sure how to say it, odds are, Forvo will have it. I've even started recording words myself, though, as a rule, all of the easy English words are done -- many of those still waiting for pronunciation look like Welsh train station names, and not that easily said.

One of the nice side effects is that I've established a bit of a correspondence with two of the French speakers -- one, a woman who lives in Switzerland, and is a student librarian, and the other, a man who lived in Paris but has just moved to Singapore as part of a job internship. I wouldn't say it's a tight friendship or anything like that, but it's pretty neat, nonetheless.