アメリカ人経営者が語るビジネス・シーン

As an advanced Japanese speaker, I am even now frustrated at

not being able to pronounce kanji combinations that I see for the

first time. In most cases, I need to ask a native speaker or spend

time counting strokes and locating characters in my kanji dictionary -

which means in most cases that it is too troublesome, and I never

really get around to memorizing the words correctly. I notice this

most when trying to read Nikkei Shimbun articles or similar texts

that are outside my immediate area of expertise.

So I was excited to run across a very good Text-to-Speech engine

this past month when visiting the DevLearn08 conference in San Jose

where I gave a speech on international e-learning programs. The engine

is made by Neospeech, and on their website you can paste in up to

200 words of text for immediate playback. Check it out - but be sure

to choose the smooth-sounding "Misaki" for Japanese, because the

male voice named "Show" (!?) still clangs like a robot. 

Now when I run across something I can't pronounce, I copy/paste a

short section of text (about a paragraph) and have Misaki-chan read it

back for me. Kind of like a personal tutor - although I have to get the

meaning from somewhere else. I have tested it with difficult place names,

technical terms, katakana catchphrases, etc. and my Japanese

colleagues also confirm that it passes with flying colors. Give it a try!

They also have English (which seems fair enough - but my ear for that is

probably more critical), Korean, Chinese, and Spanish on the site as

well. If anyone can provide any input, I would be interested to know

whether the accents are natural for those languages as well.

For those out there that want to hear recent news in English, I suggest

you check out the website of my daily newspaper the International

Herald Tribune (IHT). There you can automatically play the audio for

any article right there on the site - although again to my ear the English

is a bit stilted...