Learning How to Pronounce New Words

   If you want to be able to have conversations in Japanese as soon as possible, you'll need to have perfect or near perfect pronunciation; I have two great resources to help you accomplish this:

  1. RhinoSpike:  RhinoSpike is pretty straightforward; you submit text that you want a native speaker to read, you get a recording of it that you can put on your iPod. It can take awhile to get someone to record something for you, but you can speed up this process by recording something in your native language for someone else. Every time you record something for someone else, your own request will move higher up on the list, letting you get what you want faster. When you have large blocks of text you want a recording of, RhinoSpike is the best place to go. 

 2.  Forvo: Forvo is a like RhinoSpike but its focus is on providing recordings of individual words instead of blocks of text. The thing I like best about Forvo is their search options. (RhinoSpike doesn't have a search function) You can use their search bar to look for specific words or you can use their category filters to find a group of words (the "common words" category is very useful). Like RhinoSpike, you can make requests and download mp3 files of the recordings.

So basically, if you need a large amount of text or an uncommon word recorded for you, use RhinoSpike. If you only need individual common words, use Forvo.

Have any questions or suggestions? - Let me know in the comments section :)

Links: 

1. http://rhinospike.com/
2. http://www.forvo.com/