youglish -an online pronunciation dictionary

One of the great advantages of the internet for the language learner is the possibility of using online dictionaries to check the pronunciation of a word as well as its meaning and examples in sententences of how it is used.

The Cambridge Dictionaries Online, the Macmillan Dictionary,  the Oxford Dictionaries and many others offer this feature.

In addition, students have at their disposal some online pronunciation dictionaries like Forvo or Howjday, which come in handy when we want to find out how names are pronounced.

A few weeks ago Jeffrey Hill posted on youglish on The English Blog. youglish uses YouTube videos to illustrate how words are pronounced. The videos come complete with subtitles and  youglish  sports a repeat button so that we don't have to rewind the video to hear the word again. We can even specify whether we want the British, American or Australian English pronunciation.

Pronounce it right

I recently discovered Pronounce it right, a different online pronunciation dictionary. This is how Patrizia Serra and Laura Mazzoni, the people behind Pronounce it right, describe it:

"Can you correctly pronounce celebrity names such as Aishwarya Rai, Keira Knightley or Agnès Jaoui, or Roberto Benigni? Now try with the French President Nicolas Sarkozy or the Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Pronounce it right, establishes order in the huge phonetic mess of global communications. Common people as well as media professionals often take a guess in pronouncing foreign names or overseas words used in everyday life.

As a result, all these mispronounced names become "official" thanks to "reputable" radio and television announcers. Now, you can hear the correct articulation of any foreign name with a simple click. Why live with a bruschetta awfully pronounced or a misspelled Zbigniew Brzeziński when it’s so easy to stop making a fool of yourself?"

Patrizia and Laura have organised the names by categories and nationalities. In addition, they include categories like 'the newest 100 pronunciations' and even a pronunciation test.

Drop by Pronounce it right and explore it.

Dictionary of collocations. Ozdic

Ozdic is an online dictionary of collocations which can be extremely useful for students at an intermediate level and above.

Students can improve their accuracy in writing with Ozdic, which will show them the words that go together and will help them sound more natural.

Students look up a word to find which words are used with it. Each entry is organized around a word and its collocates. The collocates are grouped by part of speech - adjective, noun, verb and so on.

Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary

Learning to use collocations correctly is a key aspect of the language learning process from the very beginning, but especially so from the intermediate level upwards.

Collocations are the key to fluent English. Learning words on their own may help us to communicate, but we must try and learn how words combine with other words so that our English sounds natural.

The Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary can be a more than effective tool for those students who take this aspect of their English learning in earnest.

The Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary gives us guidance on common word combinations (150,000 collocations for 9,000 headwords), offering more than 50,000 examples to show us how the collocations are used in context.

Omnilexica

Omnilexica is a free online dictionary.  Omnilexica defines itself as "search in all dictionaries at once".

I think this description makes justice to Omnilexica  as it provides definitions for all English words and expressions in both mainstream and specialised dictionaries together with examples, pronunciation, videos, quotes.

 

 Drop by  Omnilexica and type in any word or expression in the search box at the top and you will discover a dictionary with a difference.

H/T to Teaching English.

Dictionary of collocations

For Better English is an online collacations dictionary I stumbled on thanks to English for University Students.

A collocations dictionary allows us to learn how words can be combined in English to say what we mean, and say it naturally.

I would go as far as saying that For Better English is a unique online tool to explore the combination of words  together.

So far, our options to check out whether our collocations were correct were limited to running a Google Fight or simply typing the phrase to check in the search box of Google and draw our own conclusions from the number of hits we got.

I hope you find For Better English useful.