I have come across an interesting way to practice language pronunciation right from within the lingQ application, using iOS native text-to-speech capabilities. As far as I am aware, about 30 of the major languages are supported in iOS6 (see full list below).
The key advantages of the approach I describe below are:
(i) Each individual word is highlighted in the text as it is being read out loud.
(ii) The quality of the text-to-speech voice is quite reasonable (at least for the languages that I tried). It does not sound robotic and unnatural like so many other text-to-speech engines.
(iii) You can slow down the speaking rate, which is quite useful if you want to be able to read ahead and anticipate each word’s pronunciation ahead of it being read out loud. Of course, this will make the speech sound less natural, but you can’t have everything…!
(iv) For certain languages such as English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Chinse, you can even configure the “dialect” or accent of the language you want to use. This is extremely useful in the case of European Portuguese pronunciation, which is not presently available via the TTS provided in lingQ (only Brazilian Portuguese is currently available). A similar comment applies for different varieties/dialects of English, Spanish, French and Chinese.
(v) Right from within the lingQ lesson view, you can easily select the portion of the lesson text to be spoken out loud (i.e., a single word, a paragraph, the entire lesson). There is no need to copy-paste the text and go into another application.
Of course, this is definitely not as good as having audio from a native speaker. However, it is definitely a good stand-in for lessons that you want to create yourself and for which you have no supporting audio. Also, when you are first learning pronunciation of a language, the features mentioned above are a definite plus in order to learn the basic sounds (phonemes) associated with different letter or symbol combinations. When you will want to move on to practice the prosody of the language (rhythm, stress and intonation), then this type of “automated speech approach” will not be appropriate and you will need to interact with native speakers.
If you want to activate this functionality on your iPhone or iPad, then here’s all that you have to do:
(1) Go into Settings → Accessibility → Speak Selection.
(2) Turn the “speak selection” button to ON.
(3) If required, configure the dialect or accent to be used (via the Dialects sub-menu).
(4) Set the “Highlight Words” setting to “ON” (this is what will cause the words to be highlighted as they are being read out loud).
(5) If required, adjust the speaking rate (you can always go back later and change this if you find that the default speed is to fast).
One you have configured these settings, you are set to go. From within the lingQ lessons view, just select the portion of text you want to have read out loud and select the “speak” option from the menu. I find that what works best is to first select a portion of the text where there are no “yellow boxes”. Once the block is marked off, I use the selection “handles” (the little blue dots) to adjust the size and position of the selected text.
You should also note that this “text-to-speech” iOS functionality works anywhere else where you can select text (e.g., a web site, a PDF document, an e-mail, and entry in your “Notes”, etc…). Enjoy!
Here is a link to an article (with photos and illustrations) which explains how to configure and use this feature in iOS.
http://www.imore.com/how-enable-speak-selection-iphone-and-ipad
Built-in voices presently included in iOS6 are: English (U.S.), English (UK), English (Australia), English (Ireland), English (South Africa), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), French (France), French (Canada), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (Mainland China), Mandarin (Taiwan), Cantonese (Hong Kong), Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish (Belgium), Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.
Limitation (In some rare cases): As of iOS6, apple has expanded the capabilities of “speak selection” to support text selections which includes multiple languages. For example, your selection could include text in both English and Chinese and the “speak selection” will detect the language for the corresponding text and apply the proper text-to-speech accordingly. However, I have found that in some rare instances this “auto language detection” can also create problems. This can occur when you have an isolated sentence (i.e., which is not part of another paragraph) and which uses rare or obscure vocabulary. In this case, the sentence’s language has the potential of being incorrectly “auto-detected” by Apple’s text-to-speech algorithm. For instance, in some of the Portuguese texts that I have tried, I have seen some rare cases where some of the isolated sentences are incorrectly read out with an English pronunciation (rather than a Portuguese pronunciation). I have been in contact with Apple regarding this, and they tell me that this can occur if some of the words in the sentence are not currently part of the iOS dictionary for that language. In that case, the pronunciation will default to the default language which is configured for the iOS device (i.e., English in my case). In the case of Portuguese, improvements are in the works, so that this problem should eventually disappear in the next iOS updates (no confirmation on the time-frame).
However, in the meantime I have found some workarounds to this problem:
(1) Easy workaround: Move the “incorrectly detected sentence” within the same paragraph as other sentences which are detected in the correct language. It seems that the language detection algorithm works on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. So if you are able to rearrange the text (e.g., in the case of a lesson that you have imported), then you can just move the offending sentence so that it is not isolated (i.e., move it within the previous block of text or the next block of text).
- More invasive workaround: Change the default language of your iPhone or iPad to be the same as the language that you are learning (e.g., European Portuguese in my case). In this case, any sentences or text fragments for which the auto-detection fails will be spoken in the default language of that device.
