A great article about Forvo in General Anzeiger (german required).

For those who like numbers and figures:

English: 8187 pronunciations; portuguese: 5136; spanish: 4653; german: 4342; catalan: 2749; italian: 1268; french: 1126; farsi: 796; finnish: 756; … and we could go on until the 83th language which has at least one pronunciation, Oshiwambo.

We are sincerely amazed by these numbers in only our first 5 months online, so thank you very much everyone!

Forvo is growing fast so we had to upgrade to a new server. Maybe you have noticed some interruptions or slow connections to forvo in the past weeks. We are sorry about that and we hope to give a better service at the new location.

ISO language codes don´t distinguish regional or country accents, so portuguese, spanish or english have only a code. It doesn´t exist brazilian portuguese, or american english. But, in fact, they exist and sometimes have little in common!

In forvo, we had covered that question asking your country to show it next to the pronunciation, but we are going further with a new and more accurate version. This is the result:

Pronunciation map for @
Pronunciation map for flickr

All you have to do is complete your personal information with your native location, (region or similar, is not necesary your street :),so all your previous pronunciations will update to this new location, giving other users a richer experience in their way to pronounce every word in the world.

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?