Six Wonderful Sites to Help

you Write, Speak and

Sound Better
27 febrero 2015Dictionaries, Phonetics, Resources, Speaking, Writing, Writing skill

Im not a native speaker.Even though I read, write , work and I would almost dare
say live and dream in English ,I havent learned the language from birth and
sometimes have moments of self-doubt. These websites I am going to share in this
post have been an invaluable help .

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Howjsay and Forvo: The worlds largest dictionaries of English Pronunciation

How often have you come across a proper name you had no clue how to pronounce
and you desperately needed to know the correct standard pronunciation of or
perhaps a variant pronunciation of this word? Lets say you want to know the
pronunciation of the word selion .You go to the most important online dictionaries

offering pronunciation , but the word youre looking up is not there and you suddenly
begin to panic. At this stage you can do three things: panic, pretend you know how
to pronounce it ( you just know how to sound British, no problem there) or look up
the word in any of these two amazing sites that have saved my skin countless times.
Linguee
We all know how difficult it is to write ,even more in a foreign language. More often
than not we look up words in dictionaries only to find that it offers so many
possibilities for the translation of the word that we dont know which one to choose
for the context we need. In fact, sometimes it doesnt help us at all but makes things
more complicated as we dont know which word to use to mean what we want to
express and we end up completely frustrated. Here, Linguee can help us as it is a
bilingual dictionary but in context
Phraseup
Sometimes we know what we want to write, the sentence is phrased in our mind, but
we cant figure out some of the words we need. This is where phraseup*comes in. It
assists you with writing, by suggesting possible combinations to fill-in the words you
cant remember. Each suggestion is accompanied by definitions, synonyms and
translations to other languages.
Imagine you know there is an expression containing the words
take and granted but you have forgotten what goes in the middle , PhraseUp can
help you here , too. Just type the words that you remember and put an asterisk *
where you want the application to insert something. Very useful, isnt it?
Or maybe you want to use the verb+preposition combination cope with but you are
just not sure which words it collocates with, just type it in PhraseUp and options will
be provided.
Ozdic.com

I have been using ozdic.com for years and this is a dictionary I cannot live without . It
is not any dictionary , it also help you to sound more natural when speaking or
writing in English.Lets say you dont know the preposition that collocates with the
verb insist, or which adverbs sound more natural with this verb; lets imagine you
need to use the word idea but you have no clue what adjective to use apart from
the overused good . Go to the dictionary now , this is just a sample of what youll
find : bright, brilliant, clever, excellent,, marvellous | valuable, worthwhile |
exciting, inspirational, interesting, stimulating | constructive, positive | absurd,
bad, mistaken, ridiculous | , crazy, mad, outlandish, wild | half-baked |
ambitious, big, grand.
The dictionary contains over 150,000 collocations for nearly 9,000 headwords and it
is based on the 100 million word British National Corpus.
Text2Phonetics
It is a wonderful tool that can save a lot of time if you need to transcribe something. I
have tried it with small texts (two or three lines) and its incredible! You will be able to
pronounce a whole text perfectly .
Just paste the text you want to transcribe and click the Transcribe Button to get the
transcription.
You might also like:
Linguee: the web as a dictionary
Writing can be fun
Confusing Words
Creative Writing Prompts
Write, Write, Write

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