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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the interesting links, it is interesting that there is a debate about it.

About software documentation translation, maybe I'm biased since the Italian speaking population is so small that it's much simpler for italians to learn basic English skills, but actually Spanish or Chinese have so many speakers that the efforts could pay back a lot more.

As for the "World Service", I would already be happy enough with a "card game" program that actually focuses on pronounce, I can't find any, even if I suspect that a simple script using osx "say" program should suffice.

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Have you taken a look at Duolingo[1]? It doesn't 100% focus on pronunciation but it certainly does provide them for all words. The app is great.

[1] http://www.duolingo.com/

Thanks, I'll try it for sure.

Your article reads fine to me, only a couple of places that gave away that you are not a native speaker.

If you can get it you might be better watching BBC World News than just listening to World Service on the radio so that you get the visual cues as well. My second language is French and it improved a lot through watching current affairs programmes each evening.

as a fellow broken english speaker I have to note: _which_ pronounce? And does it even matter?

Should "can't" be kaːnt, kʰeɪnt or kænt ? Pederasts are pɛ.dəˌfaɪl or ˈpiː.dəˌfaɪl? Do we like to dɑːns or dæns ?

(examples taken from the last two TV shows I've seen _yesterday_)

Surely there are improvements we can all have to the way we misspeak (heck, I just learned "honorable" doesn't have a "h"!) but I have given up on getting english right until native speakers finally agree on whether it's tomaito or tomahto.

(Or, as wiktionary showss: təˈmɛɪtoː, təˈmætoː, təˈmɑːtəʊ, təˈmeɪtoʊ or təˈmeɪtə..)

/dɑːns/ and /kɑːnt/ in the UK, /dæns/ and /kænt/ in most of the US.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dance#Pronunciation

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/can%27t#Pronunciation

Which way you should pronounce them depends, I suppose, on whether you speak to more British people or Americans.

It also depends on which British people you speak to - I don't pronounce those words like that.

How would the card game work? It sounds like an interesting idea.

There is a common game to learn new words of a foreign language consisting of a set of cards with the word translated in your native language in the back, and the word translated in the target language in the front. You have to pick the cards you are not very sure, and remember the translation before flipping the card. At this point you can flip the card for confirmation.

I would love to have the same, but with the ability to play the sound of the word at the same time. Sounds like a simple program to write, probably it already exists.

They are called flash cards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashcard

> Sounds like a simple program to write, probably it already exists.

It does and is called Anki. You'll probably need to search a bit though to find a deck that has italian/english with english sounds:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/english

Alternatively you could take decks made for other languages and build a new deck, since they're all stored in SQLite.

Thanks! I don't need an italian -> english one, just english with sounds will be enough.

I'm using Anki to teach reading/writing English to my kids. Anki is also a great way to learn a programming language or API (see: https://sivers.org/srs).

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