Although most of the conversations these days take place through emails and over the internet, there are plenty of instances where you have to interact with people from various countries, communities, and societies. Even if you manage to converse in a common language, you might have trouble catching up someone's name.
Foreign names may be difficult to pronounce, and it might be rude to ask a person how to pronounce their name correctly especially when you are talking with higher officials. So here are 7 Websites to Help You Pronounce Names Correctly.
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In this website, you can search a particular name, surname or a combination of the two. Even part of a name can be searched, and the sites come up with the best matches. The database is robust with a lot of names and surnames from across various countries have been listed alphabetically. Also, there are names of famous personalities belonging to each country. An audio clip tells you the exact pronunciation.
The website shows a list of popular surnames with their pronunciations by the side. You can also search a particular surname or look for more. The audio pronunciation of the word can be seen if you click on a particular word. The website will take you to a YouTube video that teaches you on how to pronounce a particular word. You can also suggest pronunciations to names.
Inogolo is probably the best website which has a huge collection of names, places and things that are new to you. You can search for a particular word and the audio pronunciation along with the phonetic pronunciation appears. The phonetic pronunciation is easy to read as it is devoid of special characters or symbols that are used in phonetics.
Also, you can search by indexes and explore upon a huge array of words relating to names, places, arts, automobiles, famous personalities and much more.
This particular website has a search field for you to find a specific name. There are categories of famous surnames, names of renowned personalities and also names of many of the sports teams such as the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB teams. A lot of names of famous artists, musicians, celebrities and commonly mispronounced names can be found in The Name Engine.
Pronounce It Right has a lot of names from various categories spanning from Arts to Philosophy. You can search for a particular name, and the advanced search engine lets you search a name by characters, surname or nationality. An app of the same functionality can be downloaded from the Google Play Store or the App Store.
This website is the pronunciation section of the famous American news portal Voice of America. The website has a massive list of names which have been sorted and indexed alphabetically. Different names, their pronunciations and the regions where they are used are mentioned in the website. The audio, as well as the phonetic representation of famous names, can be seen on the site.
Forvo is a pronunciation dictionary which has over 3 million pronounced words by native speakers in 325 languages such as English, French, Chinese, German, Arabic, etc. It has the pronunciations of common words, names and pronunciations of various languages in different dialects.
An app of Forvo is also available on the iOS and Android platforms. This is one of the best websites to learn new words from foreign languages as it has a translate option also.
Although the websites dedicated to finding correct pronunciation of names are a few, there are certain apps that you can download on your phone to learn different names. These apps are either baby name apps or simple pronunciation apps which also happen to have pronunciations of names and places as well.
These websites will be of great help if you are dealing with people comprising of various origins and ethnicity. Even if you are new to a country, do not hesitate to start a conversation fearing something would go wrong. Get help from the links mentioned here and speak like a native. If you are a student or a traveler, then I am sure this will be of great help to you.
Now here is a tip, if you don't find a particular name on the website, then just search it on the YouTube, and the chances are that you will locate the pronunciation there.
