When the elephants dance, the mice get trampled.
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Ever wonder how to pronounce a particular word? Especially if it's a different language?
Try http://www.forvo.com/languages/, or for just English, try http://www.howjsay.com/.
I understand Google, Google Chrome, and Wikipedia all have spoken pronunciation guides, too, but I don't know how to get to them. Comment if you know.
If it's one of those esoteric fictional words, or a proper name, you might be able to find it on YouTube.com.
- go to YouTube.com
- at the top, search for (for example) "ahmadinejad, cc", where the ", cc" says you want closed captions
- this will get you a list of all captioned videos whose titles or descriptions contain that word
- select one to view. If it's short, you can just listen to it
- if it's long, you can go directly to the word:
-- under the video you will see what looks like a page with a highlighted line
-- click on that icon
-- this gives you a printed transcript
-- look for the word you want, click on that line, and the video will go directly to that line.
Captioning on YouTube videos can sometimes be unintentionally hilarious, especially if it was machine generated. In the example above, in the CC transcript for the first video I tried for "ahmadinejad", it was transcribed as "on the teenager". So sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes the speaker is full of crap and pronounces it incorrectly. It's a crap shoot.
2 comments:
In Florida, I loved to watch the shiny new news anchors struggle with the Native American names for places.
KisSIMMee was always KISS-a-mee, which is the biggest way to tell that person hasn't been there or stepped foot across the Georgia line into Flarda.
Yeah. My mother was very disappointed when I sidestepped her trap and pronounced Kissimmee correctly.
I'd never seen or heard the name before, but two "m"s puts the accent on the second syllable.
One "m" would have made it a 2-syllable word (or three with "i" being the second elided syllable) and put the accent on the first syllable. (I don't think they teach that any more, the relationship of vowels and consonants making syllables.)
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