UK voices - can you delete one of them?

[nnnoooooooo]

Is anyone else incredibly irritated by the use of incorrect pronunciation in the UK version of LR? Is there any way of deleting just the voice with the speech impediment and keeping the others?

[MamaOfWill]

Yes,

Go to ADVANCED PLAY / EDIT, select the folder BK English (UK) Course Catagories (Semester 1)

Select the catagory (on the left) with the word that is bothering you

Click on the specific word in the window on the right. (For example in the catagory Action Words 1, click on the word "clap")

Click on the microphone icon labled "Pronunciation", here you can click on the pay button (bottom right) to listen to the word clap and click the left and right buttons to listen to the different recordings of the word clap, now make a note of the the file name that you don't like for example "bk-gb action words man - clap.mp3"

Double click on the word "clap" (for example) and click on the file name you don't like and delete it with the big red x button at the bottom.

OR

put the sound off and read the entire lesson, studies have shown that your child learns better from a live voice (but the recorded voices and sounds do make it more interesting for your child and easy to use for you)


OR

make peace with the different pronunciations, what sounds wrong to you sounds right to someone else and vice versa, it's a big world we live in. 

[Skylark]

Thank you, MamaOfWill, for stepping in and a good explanation of technical details!

To add on to your reply -- from my personal experience of being a linguist, living in over 20 countries and traveling with my children from birth ( they speak and understand a few languages at 3 and 2 yo), it is actually not a bad thing to expose children to different variations of the same language, different pronunciations, local accents, what would be considered a speech impediment at one place, would be an accepted norm in another. It would enrich their linguistic experience!   As long as you have a few voices you are happy with, I would not be afraid of introducing some variations as well. As MamaofWill mentioned you also can read out loud yourself, record voices of other members of your household and family -- it is great to customize and personalize!

[nnnoooooooo]

So the short answer seems to be - no, only on a word by word basis. Thanks for the explanation.  I'll give it a go! Whilst I believe it to be an unacceptable pronunciation to be teaching a child, I'm sure others would disagree (say, for example, the parents of the chid in question.)  It doesn't change the fact that it sounds and is generally assumed to be an uneducated way of speaking and substitutes v or f for the phoneme th.  I do not want to spend time suggesting to my child that this is OK when it is clearly wrong outside a very small part of East London.  Offering UK pronunciation could always be a bit tricky - which accent will most people want to hear?

Skylark - obviously we have no problem with dialects or regional accents in general.  Or speech impediments for that matter!  But I completely disagree with their use as a teaching tool for a child who has no way of understanding the difference.  Living in Scotland? Sure, expect a bit of a Scottish accent.

[lzp11]

Hi there, I am a British mum using the UK curriculum with my 9 month old DS having used the whole of the US curriculum previously with my 3-year old.

I'm interested to know which voice you view as having the speech impediment - the man, woman or child?

We are currently only up to day 30 so still quite early days.  I have come across a few words with some rather odd pronounciation (e.g. mummy - pronounced moommy), and it occasionally sounds almost as if the voices are not actually British but are faking a British accent.

Still, I like the curriculum and have heard nothing that offends my ear too much.  I do agree that a variation in pronounciation will always be the case, the UK has such a diverse range of regional accents, and the child is likely to use whatever they hear most in their local area.  Kids are very clever at hearing different pronounciations and learning to process this info.  You can always provide a correct version yourself.  I always say every word myself anyway, to provide some live input, along with the computer.  I also do the British sign language (BSL) or Makaton sign for most words at the same time.

We are really enjoying the curriculum and I love the British voices compared to the US version that we used before.  It's also been great having British versions of the words (e.g. nappy rather than diaper).  So far we've come across a couple of what I would still consider Americanisms (e.g. Egglant - we would say Aubergine), and in the word "Belt" one of the voices says "We wear a belt so our pants don't fall down", should be trousers.

But I must confess I have not heard any voices that sound in any way East End in accent?  The "Eastenders" version of the curriculum would certainly raise a chuckle from me     Please do give some more details!

[seastar]

I know what you mean - some of the pronunciations are annoying. A few recent ones:

'cot' is pronounced 'co' by one of them - I can't remember which one.

'eggplant' drove me crazy too!

My husband thinks it's hillarious to hear my daughter speaking with an English accent when we do LR (we're Irish!)

But, despite a few irritations, I'm really happy with it overall.

[KL]

Thanks very much for the valuable feedback!

Would love to know which voice in particular is troubling, so that we can assess it more carefully.  Rest assured, though, that all voice artists are definitely British (English, to be precise), and our aim was to find voices that was as neutral as possible.

For words like 'cot' sounding like 'co', it might simply be because the 't' often doesn't get recorded well if it wasn't stressed enough, rather than it being a Cockney (or whatever) accent (the accent that would say 'water' as 'wa - ah').  Will check on it though!

What do other users of the UK curriculum think? Please chime in!

[lzp11]

That's a good point KL.  At one stage I thought that there was a problem with the recordings and I realised it was because I had set LR to flash through the words too quickly, so it was cutting off the final part of the word.  By slowing down the time between each word using over-ride, the problem was solved.  Out of interest, I just tested the word cot and all of the pronounciations were correct (as in C-O-T).

[seastar]

And I just listened to it again too and the 't' was pronounced - oops, don't know what happened the first time!

[lois1]

Wellllll, I'm Scottish & the English accents just about put me over the edge but better than the American Actually they aren't that bad, pretty neutral, which is what I suppose they are meant to be. My Canadian husband thinks the accents are funny though, especially the kids who really enunciate.. our little guy isn't really saying too many of the words on LR yet but I never thought about him copying the accents, oh no!

I haven't come across the problem as noted by nnnnnnoooooooooooo, the f in place of th... but then being from the North East my husband practically thinks I have a speech impediment so I'm probably not one to comment

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