I’m sure you have all had the experience of meeting a new French word and although the spelling hasn’t been too difficult, you have not been sure how to go about pronouncing it? Well, do I have a fix for you.
I know sometimes I can be a bit slow, but I hope you forgive me for this. I only recently fully discovered the ‘Speak selection‘ and ‘Speak screen‘ functions – introduced by Apple in early 2013 and late 2014 respectively. This really does show you how quick I am on the uptake (in case it wasn’t obvious enough, that was sarcasm). I only know how it works with iOS, but I am sure that Android would have something similar.
Moving on, my friend uses it to understand her family writing Chinese on social media. She can understand spoken mandarin but she cannot read it. So, with the ‘speak selection’ function, she was able to listen to the sentences being spoken and understand. Excellent, right?
I know Apple intended it for people with speech difficulties or dyslexia etc. but it is actually useful for language learners too! For us, the ramifications of having a native speaker read the word or words out to you wherever and whenever you want are just dazzling. No more stumbling over words, because you fear your pronunciation is wrong, and people will laugh at you. You can be sure that you are on your way to pronouncing words right and developing that accent that makes you sound as if you know what you are talking about. Yes!
‘Speak selection‘ speaks only text that you have highlighted, whereas ‘Speak screen‘ speaks the whole page.Here’s how to enable it (if Apple confuses you, as it always does, or you have a different version iOS etc. Google ‘enable speak selection (and/or speak screen) for iOS _’ and you should be able to have your pick of people who explain things better than Apple does, also probably in different languages too).
This is what it should look like in practice.
You can set it to French (France) or French (Canada), and can switch between different regions for many of the languages but not all. Granted, as with all artifically speaking devices, the words in each sentence sound a bit disjointed, but if you set the speaking rate, you can almost forget that it’s not a real person, and it still pronounces french words better than your average learner.
Just another tip, try enabling the French keyboard and using the ‘Dictation’ feature (the one with a symbol that looks like an old school microphone next to the spacebar on your screen), if your French friend says a word you don’t understand, You don’t need to ask them how to spell it, just whip out your iPhone!
I can tell you, I had a hilariously fun time, going to Wikipedia and finding a random article and using the ‘read other language’ link to get my phone to speak things in ‘Arabic, Chinese (Hong Kong)English (Ireland), English (South Africa), French (Canada), German’…and you get the point.
sidenote: Chinese (Hong Kong) is not Chinese, it is Cantonese and actually a dialect. It’s like saying Breton is the same as Standard French. Which it definitely is not.
Anyway…
Mostly it’s fun to listen to your phone speak the same thing in different languages, but there are educational uses too.
orignalfrench 