English Grammar: Phonetic Spelling

Thursday 11 October 2012

Phonetic Spelling

One of the places you can go for help is the LibriVox community itself. LibriVox volunteers are very friendly, and there are volunteers all over the world, speaking a wide variety of different languages in addition to English. To request help from another volunteer, just go to the forum. Click on "New Topic" and give your subject line an appropriate title (something like "Help with French pronunciation please"). In your request, make sure you copy and paste the foreign words or sentences into the body of the text. It may take a day or longer for someone who speaks the language to see your post and respond to it.

Usually volunteers respond in one of two ways. Sometimes they'll provide you with a simplified spelling of the word(s) you need to pronounce. So, for example, the word "pronunciation" would be spelled out "pruh-nun-see-AY-shun" (a lot of people find the IPA style confusing: prə-nŭn'sē-ā'shən). Other times they'll record the words themselves, and send you a link to the audio file in the forum. You can then listen to the file, and repeat their pronunciation as best you can when you do your recording, or (if you prefer) you can copy and paste their recording directly into your file. Asking other volunteers is especially convenient for words in languages other than English, but you can, of course, ask for help on any word. In any case, make sure you thank the person who helped you!