Phonetic Pronunciation Website

[Kelliente]

This website has a flash program that shows you the phonetic pronunciations of lots of different sounds used in English, German, and Spanish. They have animations that show you how the tongue is placed inside the mouth and several spoken examples of each sound.

http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/#


Although they don't have Japanese, I thought this could be a useful site to point to when trying to explain some phonetic sound that's used in Japanese. For example, the "ng" sound used in Japanese when "g" is in the middle of a word is quite close to the same type of soft "g" used in English in words like "singer" (for example, you don't pronounce it "sinGuher", but the "g" sound is muted a little bit). Incidentally, that sound is listed under "nasal"-- it's the funny-looking n.

Moreover, I think this site could be really usefull if any of you know Japanese people who are studying English. Knowing where you need to place your tongue can be very helpful when trying to learn how to properly replicate phonetic sounds that aren't a part of your native language.

Cheers!

[Jason]

Very cool site.