Pronouncing Swedish Words Dictionary

[Braiderator]

I know that the lady built in Duolingo helps you know what the words sound like when you hear them. But I still don't know how to say them myself. I think it would be nice if Duolingo would but in a dictionary or somehow put in something that would help you pronounce it right.

Such as this as an example

brun
(broon)

orange
(o raunch)

lila
(leela)

vit
(veet)

Those are a couple words I could find online. I've tried searching for a website that would have the pronunciations for most Swedish words but I could not find any that where usefull. That would be so sweet if duolingo had one! But not only for Swedish but for all the other languages too.

[superdaisy]

Have you seen Forvo? www.forvo.com/search-sv/

The Swedish resources stickied post probably has links to dictionaries with pronunciations, but I prefer to listen to the Forvo clips obsessively and make up my own pronunciation notation.

[Braiderator]

I have. It's nice to have the guy say the stuff. I guess I will have to "guess" how to pronounce them properly

[superdaisy]

I've always struggled with IPA and similar phonetic notation, so someone's written notation doesn't really help me. I get more out of repetition and mimicry, which is where Nemo Apps come in handy: you record your pronunciation and it plays it back for you with a native speaker's pronunciation for comparison. Instant (self) feedback, surprisingly helpful for me when developing my sense of phonetics.

[superdaisy]

Oh, and important caveat: Duolingo's text-to-speech for Swedish has errors. You'll see this discussed in the sentence discussions and the Welcome post. So Forvo's actual human participants is quite a boon.

[Blehg]

http://lexin2.nada.kth.se/lexin/ has pronunciations for all entries written in pseudo-IPA, so if you're familiar with phonetic script, then it's quite helpful.

[nacreousnereid]

Perfect, thanks! I have a lot of trouble with the sk and sj, I can't quite hear exactly how they're supposed to be said, so this helps a lot.

[Hashmush]

You can check out my thread for example sentences: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/5581851

[Lundgren8]

Swedish has a lot of sounds that don’t exist in English, so having the words with an approximate English pronunciation can unfortunately only get you close at best, and I would rather recommend listening to e.g. Forvo and repeat.

[MarkBorkBorkBork]

As a native English speaker from Canada, the only new sound for me has been the sj-sound.

[Lundgren8]

The vowels are quite different as well, so they can be tricky to get exactly right. English speakers tend to pronounce Swedish u or o as English oo in ’boot’, and e as English ey for example. Some also find it difficult to tap your r’s and so on.

[MarkBorkBorkBork]

That's true. Swedish has far more distinct vowels than English, and mapping the vowel to the exact sound is something I'm definitely working on. Even the TTS engine gets them wrong, which doesn't help ;)

[deactivated user]

Found a link to this one in the WordReference forum, works fine for me, it's Swedish-German but as regards pronunciation that's of course immaterial.
http://de.pons.com/übersetzung/schwedisch-deutsch