Can't believe I'm only just now asking this, but any of these Japanese learning sites or dictionaries or whatever have audio for locations in Japan?

WWWJDIC has audio for names of some locations. (Search EDICT, not ENAMDICT.)

Apart from that, if you don't mind doing a bit of extra work, I think that you could try to use video clips from news sites. You could search for stories from/about the particular places for which you want audio of, and then rip the audio of the place names being pronounced.

[Katsuo]

CosCom has prefecture names.

Katsuo Wrote:CosCom has prefecture names.

I knew I was forgetting to check a site, thanks. Country names, too.

shirokuro Wrote:WWWJDIC has audio for names of some locations. (Search EDICT, not ENAMDICT.)

Apart from that, if you don't mind doing a bit of extra work, I think that you could try to use video clips from news sites. You could search for stories from/about the particular places for which you want audio of, and then rip the audio of the place names being pronounced.

Yes it's easy enough to rely on that, but I figure I won't bother if that's the case, I'll end up hearing the names periodically through media anyway. It's more like 'if there's already a repository of location names w/ audio' for when I happen to create a card or read it somewhere or something.

BTW, what's the deal with pitch accents and suchlike with the names of locations, how do the variations work in comparison to regular vocabulary. I never really noticed before, is it subject more to dialect/individual than the rest of the language? For instance, when I first heard native audio for 秋葉原 I thought it sounded odd, based on previous times I'd heard it.

sweet i can srs these stuff. This is useful, very useful

Maybe that can be a collaborative project, adding native audio to the names of locations on a site like Google Maps. That whole locative media wikification/geotagging meme that the cool kids are into.

Maybe there can be a kind of expatriates club/embassy section in Tokyo and other cities that have a kind of 'welcome to Japan' Augmented Reality game-tour with GPS/mobile phone stuff. As long as they don't accidentally send visitors into colour gang territory, the arms of that angry guy in the bartender outfit, Simon the Russian sushi dealer, or the headless biker... and of course watch out for Satchi!

Surely there's got to be some train obsessive who's posted on the web recordings of conductors listing station stops :-)
(Disadvantage, you'll end up with a really weird nasal accent for placenames...)

pm215 Wrote:Surely there's got to be some train obsessive who's posted on the web recordings of conductors listing station stops :-)
(Disadvantage, you'll end up with a really weird nasal accent for placenames...)

Oh yeah, station audio! You're right, surely there's an easy place to grab that... must think of search parameters... This reminds me of my previous comments, a bit: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid66485

Katsuo Wrote:CosCom has prefecture names.

Not terribly helpful, unfortunately, at least in terms of learning the pitch accent of the various prefectures without the -県 suffix. As it is, the -県 suffix affects the accentuation of the entire word, fixing it on the third from last mora (the one directly before the suffix).