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Audio for 5000 Spanish words

Hi, I think this is a lot to ask, but if you google "acapella text to speech demo" there is an absolutely excellent program which will do this for you. Set the speaker to one of the Spanish speakers (There are two from Europe and one from South America) and type in the word or phrase, then press play. I've never known it to make a mistake. If you type in some English words with an English speaker you'll see what a great job they do.

Another alternative might be to record a couple of thousand English audios yourself, and hope that the "karma" makes its way back to you.

Another thing is that Spanish spelling, unlike English, is very very consistent. There are spelling rules and once you learn them you can pronounce absolutely any word just by looking at it and reading it.

There are pronunciation videos on youtube can help you. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H6U-eQVMM0

Thanks for the idea I prefer native speakers hearing different accents and so on. I have created one course North Vietnamese 111 with audio and making another much larger one now.

As I said you can hear 3 different accents with the program I sent, although they're three standard ones and they speak very clearly, which real people don't always do.

I think it's a good idea to use the resources that are available to you already while you are waiting, but it's up to you if you want to wait.

LiveMocha is a good site for pronunciation development as you can read a paragraph at the end of every lesson and a native speaker will correct your pronunciation mistakes for you.

Also, assuming each sound file takes 1 minute to record, save, and upload, it would take 83 hours to record 5000 words. That's a lot to ask one person to do, especially when there is already a free alternative. http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html

@RabbitWho, we have got a pretty fast system for mass adding audio - see http://www.memrise.com/faq/audio-uploading/ - it should take about 1.5 -2 seconds per word. Then you just press save and send me the file, or put it in a dropbox folder for me. You should be able to record 1000 words in half an hour pretty comfortably in my experience. so If anyone does know native speakers, then they can get involved without too much effort and it is hugely appreciated.

We are going to be building much better tools for this though, for a variety of reasons. For example we want to test from sample sentences (very soon) and we need a way to record audio for those very easily and we want to be able to tag each recording with the accent of the speaker, so that people can choose the accents that they want to hear. This is coming down the line.

Hope that helps, and please get in touch if you can help with any recording, because it would be hugely appreciated!

Best wishes

Ben

That's cool Ben! I can do a few English ones if you want, if you promise the site won't ever suddenly close its doors and tell everyone to pay for the resources we helped build.. that happened to me before. Also you could have a box on the side that said something like "hey! you're a native X speaker I see! Would you record this word for us?" and then people could do one every now and then without even giving it a second thought.

I think I can do this, maybe over the weekend.

I tried "acapella". I am not so impressed with the Spanish. On the other end the French is scarily human, A+ on this one.

Some of the voices are better than others, did you try all 4 Spanish voices? (I know I said there were three, but they have added a new one)

Yes I did and found them a little too "mechanic", not enough intonations. I tried all French voices and they pretty much sounded as if I was talking to someone in my family, except of course too proper. All speakers tend to chew words in their language.

Well the native Spanish speakers I showed the Spanish voices to were impressed, I guess they're not so fussy! hee hee. I'm really impressed by the English ones myself, I recommend it to all my students to help them with their pronunciation. One of the voices couldn't pronounce "bear" (it said "beer") I forget which one, but all the others were perfect.