Improve your pronunciation of foreign languages

Forvo ( www.forvo.com) is the world’s biggest pronunciation website, with 5m words clearly pronounced in more than 370 languages. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, every word is spoken by a native, and voted on by the Forvo community to deliver the most accurate results.

Now, those same pronunciations are available on both Android ( www.snipca. com/32975) and IOS ( www.snipca. com/32976). The apps cost £2.99 and require signing up to a free Forvo account, but this is well worth doing if you’re learning a language and want to sound more authentic.

It’s very easy to use: select your language pair, such as English to French, German to Russian, Italian to Japanese and so on, then enter the word you want translated. The results are comprehensive, usually giving you several options – particularly for languages spoken across several territories. For example, asking for the pronunciation of the French word for banana (‘banane’) delivered four results, with both male and female voices from France and Belgium. Searching for car (‘voiture’) gave us nine, including Swiss French (see screenshot below).

If you come across anything that isn’t yet in the database, you can put in a request for it to be added, and give back to the app by recording your own renditions of words and phrases other users have asked for. When we dipped in to the queued requests, they ranged from the benign ‘science book’ and ‘Robert Hardy’ to complex entries including ‘the ship was stranded on a sandbank’ and ‘phyllobates terribilis’ (the official name of the endangered golden poison frog).