Customer Reviews

Fonetiks Pronunciation Guides with Instant Sound

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As the other reviewer says, "Fonetiks is a unique publication in more ways than one..." The curious fact is that the exactly same comment can be found at their own website. If you use a search engine and type in keywords like the name of this product, you can get to their website pretty easily, and you will see how the product looks like. When I bought this product, I was dissapointed so much. If there is a no-star option, I would rather choose it because this software does not help anything. As I, myself, am an EFL(English as a foreign language) speaker, I found this product a good-for-nathing. You can only hear few sample sounds from these ten languages listed above and the sound quality is also baaaad! I am a student of linguistics and I was taking a phonetics class. I thought this CD-ROM might be a helpful tool for my studies, but it turned out to be a waste of money. If you are taking a phonetics class for some languages and if you have thought that this might help you, no! Just forget this.

Fonetiks is a unique publication in more ways than one. It's the world's first CD-ROM where you can simply mouse over text to hear it spoken - quite a big step forward in language learning, making an instant connection between the spoken and written word.

But it's also a new way of looking at languages: each language is divided up into six types of sounds: single vowels, diphthongs, triphthongs, voiced versus voiceless sounds, consonants, and stress/intonation. The result is that seemingly 'hard' languages like Mandarin or Japanese suddenly become quite easy to get to grips with.

Another unique thing about Fonetiks is the fact that it presents seven varieties of English: American, British, Australian, etc. - ESL learners won't find this anywhere else, at least not in this breathtakingly convenient mouseover format. The same goes for Parisian versus Canadian French, and German versus Swiss German.

As if this were not enough, there is also a unique "Spoken Grammar" for ESL learners, plus conversation patterns for English, French and German. More than 40 people comprised the "cast" of authentic native speakers that put this production together. This is a unique, major resource for people who love languages.