Pleitecas, spanish editor.

Q: A little bit about you.

A: My name is Pedro. I´m an almost retired spaniard looking for developin my hobby, my comunication skills. I love nature and peace. I studied Geography. I´m sure we can be happy together if we are able to understand each other. We need a tool in order to traslate our feelings! I´m able to understand Spanish and written English, France and Italian, and a little bit of Romanian, Portuguese, Russian and Bulgarian.

Q: When did you know about Forvo?

A: I knew Forvo a year ago when a was looking for Bulgarian pronunciations.

Q: What did you like most?

A: What I like most is the possibility to record the MP3 pronunciations and listen to them wherever you are, until you are able to remember it. I like to put words together and build up phrases. That is the best!

I remember a book  I read when a was only a boy. The author is Ramon J. Sender and the title La tesis de Nancy (Nancy´s thesis). The story is about a study trip to Spain of a North American teenager trying to learn Spanish in Sevilla and a young gipsy with his own dialect-language different to regular Spanish as a teacher. Funny. I would like to recommend it all of you.

One of things we most like about Forvo is the oportunity to meet some incredible valuable people. That´s why we are starting a new section in this blog to introduce you to some of the editors that collaborate at Forvo. Snowcrocus, an english editor it´s the first one.

Q: A little bit about you.

A: I currently live in Florida, though hopefully I’ll be moving to Europe once I finish my doctorate. I grew up in Wisconsin, mostly in a tiny village with one business – a blacksmith. I’ve also briefly worked and/or gone to school in Germany, Peru, and France.

My background is anthropology/archaeology, and I currently do research in heritage conservation policy. Languages are kind of a hobby for me; I’ve studied Latin, German, French, Low German (Plattdeutsch), Russian, Swedish, and Spanish (in that order).

I even made up a language when I was 12 and taught it to a friend, so we could get in trouble with our teachers for speaking it in front of them. Unfortunately the only languages I can still speak are German and French, and I’m still working very hard to become fluent in French (which I find way more confusing than German!).

Q: When did you know about Forvo?

A: The French is what brought me to Forvo in the first place – looking for pronunciations of French words, especially things I couldn’t find in the dictionary or that have sounds I’m bad at distinguishing.

I’ve enjoyed doing pronunciations in English (often cringing when I hear my own voice afterward, though). Hopefully they’ll prove useful to someone along the way, as I’ve found the pronunciations by the French-speaking members so helpful, myself. After careful consideration, I’ve been forced to admit that English pronunciation is even more convoluted than French pronunciation…

Q: What did you like most?

A: Forvo has also been a great place to interact with other members, sharing information about dialects and discussing odd linguistic tid-bits. I enjoy learning about variations within English as much as I enjoy fiddling around with foreign languages, and Forvo is certainly a great forum for that.

In the following weeks we expect to bring you more Forvo “interviews”.

Recents comments about Forvo in websites and TV.

- In Mexican TV: Noticieros de Televisa at 07:15 in the tv watch.

- In ReadWriteWeb: 5 great translation tools.

- In a Polish aggregator: Wykop

- In MetaFilter: You say poe-tay-toe.

1. IKEA
2. Lykke Li
3. Mjölner
4. ABBA
5. Sverige
6. Björn
7. Göteborg
8. Järnspikar
9. Jag älskar dig
10. Stellan Skarsgård

1. Роман Павлюченко
2. Stolichnaya
3. Mikhail Gorbachev
4. Привет
5. Владимир Владимирович Набоков
6. эрекция
7. здравствуйте
8. Svetlana Kuznetsova
9. Medvedev
10. Dmitri Shostakovich

Have you tried to use Forvo from a mobile device? It works pretty fine, but when it comes to listen to pronunciations… oops, you won´t hear anything.

We are introducing some changes to give a better mobile experience. So depending on your device you could listen to pronunciations. Here are the requirements:

- Javascript and Flash Lite enabled browser.

We are not happy with this solution but it´s a first step to bring more compatibility. Feel free to comment your mobile experience in this post.

Categories or tags are a different way to learn pronunciations in Forvo. We let users add them so they are creating very interesting groups of words, like these categories: Greetings, Opera or France with hundred of words in many languages.

Now we have found that there are more than 12.000 different tags and this classification was semi-hidden to you. That didn´t make sense. So now you can browse the whole categories list and also filtered by language from the language profile page (i.e. japanese and japanese categories).

Hope you like this feature.

1. Schiphol
2. Dijkstra
3. Godverdomme
4. Gouda
5. Scheveningen
6. Dirk Kuyt
7. Hoegaarden
8. Hieronymus Bosch
9. Utrecht
10. Piet Mondrian

1. Ronaldinho
2. João
3. Paulo Coelho
4. Rio de Janeiro
5. Paulo Freire
6. Caipirinha
7. Eu te amo
8. Merda
9. Saudade
10. Ronaldo

We have introduced a new lovely feature: translations for each word. Thanks to the Google Translate service, now from every word page you will see that word translated from the original language (more than 50 languages in google´s tool) to the interface language (spanish and english at this moment).

So if translations are not perfect blame Google :)

All Forvo members hope you will enjoy and learn more with this new feature.