Extra Listening Practice

The other day, one of Edwin's commenters made reference to NextUp reading software. There's a free 15 day trial. The neat thing about the software is it can do the accents for a handful of languages. If you're interested in Mandarin you're out of luck. But for English, French, German, Spanish and Russian you can listen to text in your language instead of having to hunt for spoken mp3s. The quality is not the best (with the free voices, don't know about the ones for purchase). However, a trip to BBC.co.uk, followed by selecting of content in your target language gets you a chance for instant listening with a transcript - the article it's reading to you. I would not recommend this for developing your accent - better get real voices - but for listening comprehension it's worth a look.