Text to Speech Tool: Improve French Pronunciation with "French Spanish Online" Site

Recently, while doing some grammar workbook problems, I stumbled across a very useful service, French Spanish Online. It consistently helps me to improve my French pronunciation. Go to this Adobe Flash application: “Text-to-Speech” Site Pal

French Spanish Online/Voice
and you will be able to follow my instructions below.

This tool is very simple to use in many languages. 

Follow these steps for hearing a word pronounced in French:

• Choose French on the top drop down box
• Type in the word or words with correct orthography (for instance, the accent marks are important)
• Select a face (it is amazing how strange it is to hear a male voice while seeing a female image) on the second drop down box. Choices include males, females, a skeleton, a dog, and a guy that looks a lot like President Obama. When you click the 'say it' button, the lips move as though speaking! This is the first cartoon I've ever been able to lipread a bit.
• Select the name of the speaker of which there are many. For instance, there are speakers with Canadian, Euro, and standard French pronunciations.
• There are also drop down choices for effects and levels which I haven't figured out how to use yet.

I have been using this application for a couple of weeks. When there is a word to pronounce of which I am uncertain, this can be used for a really excellent “repeat after me” practice. The program also does very well at “speaking” whole phrases or sentences.  There are people's names with which I have great difficulty guessing at how they might be pronounced. I can finally now remember how to pronounce the name 'Leroy' with French flair.

Try a couple of different speakers, sometimes for the same word. For some reason the male pronunciation may be clearer to me than the female or vice versa. Pour quoi? J'en sais pas. 

For example, I just typed in 'semblable' because I couldn't get my lips to work to pronounce it. After listening to it, I was able to pronounce the word properly when before it was coming out of my lips as gibberish.

In the past, I have been able to use Google Translate intermittently much the same way. But for some reason lately, G.T. speech just hasn’t functioned. The Text-to-Speech works for me all of the time, every time.