Archive
Meta-search many historical German dictionaries and encyclopedias using Woerterbuchnetz.de
A meta-search by the University of Trier Center for Digital Humanities may not teach you much German – you need to know it already –, but help prevent you remaining a “one-dimensional man”.
I came to know a lot of those during my own German and history studies a long time ago – – when they still only existed on paper, if not parchment 
. Gotta love Digital Humanities, and find other activities for physical exercise. Her is an example search result:
How to transcribe English into phonetic alphabet using Phonetizer.com
Phonetizer transcribes into IPA. The vocabulary seems somewhat limited (45000 claimed) – English spelling variants do not help, although Phonetizer offers BE as an input option. I have not found a length limit for the transcription with an article from the current Economist of over 1000 words – should be plenty for most reading/recording assignments in the LRC. Easy as (web2)py. 
The web version is advertisement-based. The downloadable version is not free, so we cannot install it in the LRC, unfortunately.
Phonetic transcription websites
Computerized Language resource centers are supposed to work wonders improving SLA students’ pronunciation: Can’t computers analyze and visualize sound for us?
However, it turned out there seems to be a considerable “impedance mismatch” not only between computers analyzing and understanding the signal, but also between a computer voice graph and the capability of a language learner to process and improve pronunciation on the basis of it.
Voice graphs may have some use for tonal languages. But can you even tell from a voice graph of a letter which sound is being produced?
Enter the traditional phonetic transcription that pre-computerized language learners remember from their paper dictionaries (provided you can teach your language learners phonetic symbol sets like the IPA). Not only are good online dictionaries perfectible capable of displaying phonetic symbol sets on the web (it’s all in Unicode nowadays).
There are now experimental programs that can automate the transcription of text into phonetic symbol sets for e.g. English, Portuguese or Spanish. The more advanced ones also come with text-to-speech.
You can provide your students with audio (or, text-to-speech capability provided) or text models and have them study the phonetic transcription, listen to the audio, and record their model imitation in the LRC. Maybe you will find that practice with recording and a phonetic transcription of the recorded text is more useful for your students’ pronunciation practice than a fancy voice graph.
Linguee dictionary lookup based on parallel corpora
- Support for more languages is planned (Chinese, Japanese):
- The interesting approach based on parallel corpora provides a wealth of empirical data, albeit a bit raw and of varying quality, e.g.:
Eva English Word Lookup against Wordnet
- Eva Word Lookup – not listed under the extensions, but run against Wordnet, the lexical database for English – enables you to study your English words in depth. This lookup gives you information organized by the following aspects of your word, linked from an overview of each word type your search term can belong to:
- the coordinate terms (sisters)
- the derived forms
- the synonyms/hypernyms (ordered by estimated frequency)
- the hyponyms (troponyms for verbs)
- the holonyms, for nouns
- the meronyms, for nouns
- sample sentences, for verbs
- Below is what results look like for example search term “design”:
How to use Google translate for writing Cyrillic letters with a western keyboard, pronunciation help, and text-to-speech
Go to Google translate and do like so. Useful for learning, as well as typing when teaching.
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If you cannot find it here, look there: 5,500 Language-Learning Links and Programs for learning or teaching 150 languages
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Learning usage samples: Sanako oral exam, Kaltura webcam presentation, Dictation with speech recognition, Sanako written exam, Chinese and Japanese interactive stroke-order practice
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