Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Great Pronunciation Site

The words Bag and Back: A minimal pair
that's difficult for some language learners. 
I was going to do a common error today, but I decided to share a link to a great website instead. Honestly, I'm running low on ideas for common errors, so if you have a suggestion for one, I'd love to hear from you.

Anyhow, the site is called "shiporsheep.com," and it focuses on minimal pairs. If you don't know what a minimal pair is, it's basically two words that are pronounced exactly the same, except for a single sound. Some examples of minimal pairs are words like bag and backchip and cheap, chip and ship, pig and pick, and, of course, ship and sheep.

shiporsheep.com is great because after you click on the sounds you want to focus on, it'll open a page with all sorts of examples of the sounds you want to practice. Then you only need to put your mouse over a word to hear it pronounced.

One disadvantage of the site is that there's no feedback. You can pronounce the words after you hear them, but there's no one or nothing to indicate if you're actually pronouncing them correctly. Still, it's a cool site, so you should check it out!

That's all for today, but later this week I'll try to give you a few more language-learning resources. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

2 comments:

Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment! If you have a specific comment about this post, please tell me. If you have a general question about the site or a common error suggestion, you can also use the "Contact" link at the top of the page.
-Ryan

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