Description

HOW TO LISTEN TO THE TEXT

Multimedia-English is the web you can listen to. But how can you listen to a word or the text?  On top of every page, under the top menu, to the right, you can see a link that says TTS: Text To Speech

To listen to a word or a sentence, first you have to select that word or sentence and then you can click on that link . So first select the text, then click, and a new window will open up with a nice robot man who will read the selected text for you (with an American accent). After listening to it, you can close the window and come back to this website.

So now let's have a try. Select one sentence from this page and click the of Text To Speech. The new window that was opened to read your selection looked like this:

Now let's see some things you can change in that window.

1- Voice Speed You can make the man read faster or more slowly changing the speed. The speed button is near the top of the window. When you click on it, you'll get a list of numbers as you can see in the picture below. Normal speed is 0, +3 is faster, -3 is more slowly.

2- Man / Woman   Next to the speed box you can see another box reading "language". The default selection is "English (male)". If you prefer to listen to a woman's voice you can choose "English (female)". It is interesting to get used to both kinds of voices. The only accent available is American English.

3- Play again Next to the language box you can see a button reading "Say it". Every time you click on that button the robot will read it again.

4- Translate You can choose among 12 different languages. At the top left corner of that robot window you can see this bar:

If you click on one of those languages a translation window will open. You can translate from one language to another and then listen to the words or sentences in English and the other language.

IMPORTANT

This robot can read almost anything, but don't forget it's just a robot. His pronunciation is very good and natural for a robot, but his intonation is not too accurate. It sounds alright most of the times, but don't take it as a model. So if you select a word, his pronunciation will be perfect, or almost perfect, but if you select a sentence, remember that the pronunciation will be correct, but the intonation may be wrong, quite artificial.

Also, you can select a text and listen to it (maximum 1000 characters), but be careful. If the text is a paragraph, with the right punctuation, he will read it quite correctly. But with some kinds of formats and punctuations the reading may sound quite chaotic, with incorrect intonation and a bad use of pauses. Nevertheless, you can try and see how good it sounds.

Now you can listen to English in the videos and in the text too! Don't hesitate to listen to the pronunciation of a word every time you are not sure of it. Remember: first select, then click.

PHONETICS

The pages in the section of phonetics are different. They use "mouse-over technology", so you can listen to the phonetic sounds and the examples just by moving your mouse over it.

JOKES

With the section of jokes you can find two different ways to open the robot. One is the link seen before, first you select and then you click. But inside the text of the joke you will find one or more of these sepaker images:



If you click on that button, you will hear the joke in English straight away. Just click and listen (no selection needed). When using these buttons you should leave the robot window open but go back to the joke page to read the text there, because the text that the robot is reading has been adapted to work better for the robot, so sometimes I have made some changes in spelling and punctuation that are not correct in written English. Go to the Jokes section, click one of these buttons and see how they work!

BRITISH ACCENT

There are no good robots with British accent yet (if you know of one, tell me), but under the link of Text-to-Speech there are two more links: Dictionary and Sound BrE. If you click on the DICTIONARY link, a new window will open with an online dictionary. You can look for a word and then, on top of the page (to the left) there is an American flag and a British flag. If you click on the flags you can hear that word pronounced with an American or a British accent (depending on the flag).

And the other link, the Sound BrE, will open a pronunciation dictionary with a British accent. You write a word in the search box and then you only have to move the mouse over the word to listen to its pronunciation.

So now you have no excuses to not pronounce words correctly. When you find a word you are not sure about, go to the Sound BrE and listen to it there, listen to it several times and repeat after the speaker till your pronunciation is correct. That is a real man speaking, not a robot, so the pronunciation is really perfect.

Explanation