At EC San Francisco, we work to help students develop all aspects of their understanding of English, so that they can fully participate in the World English community. Naturally this includes Reading, Writing, Listening, Grammar, etc., but for effective communication, pronunciation must be an ongoing aspect of Speaking. If you know the words, but don’t say them right, nobody will understand you.
Nowadays, if you have a SmartPhone, you don’t need to take your English teacher along with you when you go out. Pronunciation help can be just a click away. However, there are a lot of “helpful” sites out there, and they are not all equally accurate. I’ve found www.forvo.com to be quite useful – and not just for English! Their claim is “All the Words in the World Pronounced.” I’m not convinced about that claim, but it’s a great site to check out.
While you are at it, if you want to work a bit on vocabulary, you can always spend some time on www.freerice.com, and help fight world hunger as you develop higher-level vocabulary. The site was designed to help US students develop vocabulary for the SAT (college exam), but if you have a good memory, you can develop sight recognition of a lot of words you probably didn’t even know were words. And for every right answer, a small amount of rice is donated to the United Nations to help feed hungry people around the world. So your gain is their gain as well.
We love to provide you with helpful suggestions and study hints, but we would even more like to see you in San Francisco. Come by and visit us.