Welsh Word Audio Clips
Hi Everyone,
I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on that I think could be really useful for those building your own Anki decks, flashcard sets, or just looking to improve vocabulary and pronunciation.
What is it?
I have generated audio clips for over 17,000 of the most frequently used words in the Welsh language, based on the CorCenCC (National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh) written corpus.
** Please note that these are all lemmas (base dictionary words) rather than every possible conjugated or mutated form. Also, interjections have been removed (“hmm”, “ymm”, and the like). **
Why? Because producing every single surface form (tenses, mutations, persons) would have turned 17,000ish clips into hundreds of thousands. That would have been a technical nightmare to generate and impossible to quality-check in any meaningful way. Sticking to lemmas keeps the collection high-quality and manageable.
How it was made?
I used the best Welsh text-to-speech engine I could find to generate the clips. You will notice they are all in a North Wales Male voice. I chose this specific voice because, after a lot of testing, it was the most natural-sounding one available. Due to technical limitations, I stuck to this single high-quality voice rather than mixing different ones.
I have spent many, many hours refining these clips and quality-checking the results to ensure the files are as clean, authentic and accurate as possible.
How do I get my hands on them?
You can download via this Google Drive link:
Welsh Project Google Drive Link
- Pick and choose: You can browse the “AudioClips” folder and download the words which you require.
- The Google Drive also contains a “Top 1000 Written Welsh Lemmas” premade Anki Deck" inside the “AnkiDecks” folder. (I plan to create more Anki Decks in the future).
Possible use cases:
- Flashcards (Anki, Mnemosyne, SuperMemo, Quizlet, etc): This is the main use case. If you use Anki or any other flashcard or spaced-repetition app that allows you to upload your own media files, you can import these audios to give your cards a voice.
- Pronunciation checking: If you see a word written down and aren’t sure of the pronunciation, you can search this folder to hear it instantly.
Strengths & Weaknesses?
- The Good: It’s a massive resource. If you are looking for the pronunciation of a specific word, it is almost certainly in here. It covers the vast majority of vocabulary you will encounter daily.
- The automatically generated nature: While I have put a lot of time into filtering out bad files, this was still an automated process involving thousands of clips. There may still be the occasional “dud” or robotic pronunciation that slipped through the net.
** Note on Filenames: To ensure the files work on all computers, some special characters have been replaced with underscores (e.g. you might see i_r.wav instead of i'r.wav ). The audio itself is correct! **
Request for Feedback . . .
If you find any clips that are broken, silent, or just sound wrong, please let me know in this thread. I can easily regenerate specific words, so I’m happy to fix them and improve the collection for everyone. Also, if the Anki Deck has mistakes, let me know.
Download Link:
Welsh Project Google Drive Link
The Premade Anki Deck.
The Top 1000 Written Welsh Lemmas based on the CorCenCC collection.
This Deck has 7 fields:
- Rank
- Welsh Word
- English Meaning
- Part of Speech
- Audio (automatically pulled from the Anki2 collections folder)
- Welsh Sentence (An example sentence, only shown when the Welsh word is shown)
- English Sentence (The English translation of the Welsh Sentence, only shown when the English word is shown)
** The deck contains HTML and CSS formatting **
Mwynhewch 
P.S. I may update and improve the Anki Deck(s) and the audio clip collection from time to time, so if you can’t see the files on the Google Drive or the drive isn’t available, I am probably in the process of uploading better versions.