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.

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”.

- 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.

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.

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.

So if translations are not perfect blame Google :)

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