Learn pronunciation of English words and improve your English
While there are so many ways to improve your English speaking abilities and English vocabulary, understanding the relation between the spelling and pronunciation of English words had always been a challenge for the non-native English speakers.Here comes a free app called wikispeak, a phonetic dictionary, that helps you understand such correlation.
Wikispeak has a simple and fast graphic interface to retrieve the phonetic transcription ( IPA ) and the pronunciation of any English word, while avoiding the annoying process of browsing dictionaries!!! It is so fast that it lets you determine the pronunciation of English words, in no time. You can also understand the phonetic transcription very easily with wikispeak.
Features of wikispeak
The following are the features of wikispeak.
- Phonetic transcriptions are from CMU Project
- Pronunciations are retrieved from the Learner’s Dictionary of Merriam Webster’s
- IPA chart simplified for English with sound included in the program.
- Released under Open Source GNU license
How to download, install and open wikispeak on windows?
- 1. Free Download wikspeak from here to any location on your computer.
- 2. Unzip the file, the wikspeak folder will be created.
- 3. Using any File Manager program (for example, Windows Explorer), browse inside the wikspeak folder, and double click on the wikspeak.exe file to start the program.
To uninstall wikispeak, simply delete the “wikspeak” folder and any compressed file that has been downloaded.
How to use wikispeak?
Wikspeak works in Manual and Automatic modes.Manual mode is the default mode and to enable automatic mode, place a checkmark in the “Auto” checkbox.
In manual mode, when you type an English word in the text box and click the “Enter” button, the phonetic transcription will be shown in the field below. note that WikSpeak will only show phonetic transcriptions when the “Sound” checkbox is disabled.
in automatic mode, the textbox will instantly display a word that has been selected and copied within the text of any application. The phonetic transcription will also be displayed, and a sample of the word’s pronunciation will be given if the “Sound” checkbox is enabled.The automatic mode is appropriate when reading text from any application such as a web browser, word processing program, etc.
Phonetic transcriptions are now built into the program and they can be displayed at any time, even if the program is offline. The program only requires an Internet connection to retrieve pronunciations (when the “Sound” checkbox is enabled).
Pressing the chart button opens a second window showing the IPA Chart for English. This window is a cross-reference between IPA symbols and English phonemes. Actually each symbol is a button to play the sound from the corresponding IPA symbol. By positioning the pointer on any IPA symbol within the phonetic transcription and holding down the left mouse button, the selected IPA symbol is shown in a small pop-up and the corresponding phoneme is played. The pop-up is closed when the button is released.
However, the program currently (at the time of writing this article) provides phonetic transcriptions in British English (Received Pronunciation) while the pronunciations are given in American English; therefore, some transcriptions don’t match exactly with their pronunciations. Even in these cases, the phonetic transcriptions are useful given the fact that the difference is very subtle.Wikispeak developers have promised to fix this in future releases.
Free Download wikispeak and improve your English speaking abilities, by uderstanding the pronunciation of English words!!! There is also a web version of wikispeak if you don’t like to download and install the program.
