The Dutch TTS voices on LingQ are really bad. They don’t sound realistic at all.
I’ve come across tons of words that they pronounce very incorrectly. Such as “jongeren” and many more. Moreover, they all pronounce the “n” in words than end in “en”. But for almost all words that end like that, most native speakers don’t pronounce the “n”.
For comparison, the google translate voice is actually quite decent. So why doesn’t LingQ just use a voice similar to that?
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I haven’t listened to the TTS, but pronounciation does vary depending on region. the n at the end of a word is pronounced depending on where you live. These are differences between Belgium and the Netherlands but also within these countries.
Learning Dutch is learning a lot of different accents and pronounciations.
source: native, I looked it u: see also : https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/guide-to-the-dutch-alphabet#:~:text=EN,the%20N%20is%20basically%20silent.&text=In%20the%20east%20and%20the,Netherlands%2C%20the%20N%20is%20pronounced.
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azarya is absolutely correct. There are all kinds of regional differences that I’ve noticed in my (VERY LIMITED) experience. And these are natives speaking…not the TTS.
Not sure about the TTS. It could very well be horrible. Do you have an example lesson? Or do you just mean like on a per word basis?
By the way…you could check out Edge browser “Read Aloud” or “Immersive Reader” mode. I haven’t checked the Dutch ones out, but the voices for German and Spanish are great, and they have regional dialects for those. So if you’re just needing a better reader or audio for a lesson you could try that…On the lesson, click 3 dot menu, go to “print lesson”. Then use the Edge Browser “Read Aloud” or “Immersive Reader” and have it read it. If you want, you could record it using Audacity or something similar and upload the audio to the lesson. Yes, a bit of a pain, but in some cases worth it.