Online Pronunciation Guides
NameShouts has an audio database of the pronunciation of thousands of names. Fifty searches free per month. Lists and Favorites let you collect and save pronunciations for when you need to access them quickly, whether for a call list, an upcoming class, or book you’re reading.
Free web application to get the audio and text pronunciation, meaning and other information related to wiki pages, synonyms and antonyms for the searched word. It supports many major languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and more. The tool features pronunciation for a plethora of words, names, places and medical terminology.
Users can also contribute to this network by uploading their own recordings as regional dialect pronunciation for a specific word. You can also view your most searched and Favorited words easily.
Key Features: Audio and text pronunciations along with their meanings, share pronunciation and meaning with friends, Multilingual support for many languages.
This website has a large collection of names and pronunciations. The website has a simple interface and you can search a name by typing it in a search box and the website will show you names matching your search keyword. If you can’t find a word on the website, you can request for it or submit one yourself by uploading your voice recording in .mp3 or .wav format.
Key Features: Includes Phonetic spellings and audio recordings of over 100,000 names, ability to upload your own WAP/MP3 recording of a pronunciation.
Forvo
This resource has over 3 million pronounced words by native speakers in 325 languages, including major languages such as English, Mandarin Chinese, German, Spanish, French and many more. This app is a great tool to learn how to pronounce words from a wide array of categories including common words, phrases and names.
The words are categorized as ‘Top words’ in all languages and once you select a word, you will be provided with the best pronunciation among pronunciations in other dialects. There is also a ‘Language of the day’ section in the web interface, that lets you learn interesting facts and pronunciation of popular words in that dialect.
Key Features: 2.5 Million+ words, 325 languages, pronounced by native speakers, Wide array of categories to choose from.
Pronouncing Chinese Names
Guide from Arizona State University
The following begins with a simple introduction to Chinese names and the pronunciation system. It then provides clickable audio files for sounds that are more distant from those of English.
Finally, this guide will provide Romanization and audio files for 1) common Chinese surnames and 2) the names of faculty members and some graduate students of the Chinese program at SILC as examples since there are no common given names in Chinese.