We are finishing a new feature at forvo: accents on maps.

You know that forvo supports various pronunciations for the same word, because if you are from Lisboa your portuguese will be very different from a brazilian. Until now there was only a little text next to the speaker to show his country.

Now we are going further: Users can geolocate theirselves (exactly their accents) using the popular Google Maps tool. You can update your personal information to mark exactly your native accent.

In the next days we will complete this feature showing a map with located pronunciations in the word page.

Hope you like it.

We have received some comments from linux users who didn´t hear anything when clicking on pronunciations. Finally we follow the right clue and it´s solved now. So, welcome and enjoy forvo too.

Great article about forvo.com in downloadsquad, a reference site about technology.

You can read it here: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/07/16/forvo-helps-you-speak-like-a-native/

Many of you ask this question. We don´t really know if we should say what it means or not if it ever means anything. The explaination is so simple that maybe you´ll get disappointed.

So, what do you think “forvo” means? Wait for clues in the next posts…

If you are a registered user at forvo.com, now you can send messages to other users through our new internal messaging system.

The main purpose is to allow communication and feedback between users. For example, most users want to thank someone for pronouncing hundreds of the words they asked for. So here you are. It´s simple but it will do the job.

How to use it? You´ll see a contact user link in every user profile page, and all the messages that you send and received will be under a new section called… messages (in the menu at the top of the page when logged).

We hope this help to make forvo better for you.

Why are we writing this blog? There are three main reasons:

1. It´s a perfect communication way with the users. We have managed to update the little news section in the homepage but it´s not a solution. The blog will help us to announce new improvements without being annoying through newsletters. It´s also a place to leave your feedback, that btw, is great.

2. We have plans to use it as a discussion site about pronunciations. We will propose some words to discuss the proper(s) pronunciation. More than that, in the next weeks users will be able to open discussions by theirselves. More on this later.

3. The blog will also cover news, videos, and things that happen around forvo.

The next question is: english, spanish or both?

Football (soccer) has been a high activity category at forvo. There are more than 500 pronouced words or names related to football, including the best players ever like Zinedine Zidane in french, Pelé in portuguese, Johan Cruyff in dutch or Maradona in spanish. Do you miss someone in this list? Go ahead and add their names to forvo.

Many people don´t know that forvo pronunciations are ready to be shared and posted in blogs like this. Follow up these steps:

1. Find the word you want to embed. In this example, the recently passed away designer Yves Saint Laurent

2. Copy the code under the “share this pronunciation”. The chosen pronunciation is what we call the “standard” by complex calculations ;) (votes, type of user, etc).

3. Paste it to your post like this…

So that´s it. You could even do some nice compositions. Good luck!

This blog is intented to be a way to communicate things that happen at forvo.com and make some discussions about words and pronunciations. It´s time to have a better feedback from you. So by now, stay tuned to pronuncionary.com and have a happy pronunciation.