Listen to English Banana.com Worksheets

Did you know that you could listen to any of our .pdf worksheets?

This is a really useful - but little-known - feature of the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Although it's limited by the quality of the reading voice that you have installed on your computer, it's still a helpful tool for English language students - especially if English is not your first language.

Here's how it works.

1. Make sure that you have Adobe Acrobat Reader (6.0 or above) installed on your computer and that you're running Windows. If you don't have Acrobat Reader, click here to get it now!

2. Choose the file that you want to open, then open it with Acrobat Reader.

3. Go to "View". Select "Read Out Loud" (at the bottom), then "Activate Read Out Loud". Or use this shortcut instead: Shift+Ctrl+Y.

4. The other shortcut commands are:

Deactivate Read Out Loud - Shift+Ctrl+Y

Read This Page Only - Shift+Ctrl+V

Read To End of Document - Shift+Ctrl+B

Pause - Shift+Ctrl+C

Stop - Shift+Ctrl+E

5. The program uses your computer's default reading voice. You can change this voice - as well as the speed, pitch, and other settings - by going to: Edit > Preferences > Reading.

We feel that out of the voices provided on MS Vista, the most natural-sounding voice belongs to Microsoft Anna - English (United States). We slowed her down slightly to around 150 words per minute, which made her sound a little more normal!  If you don't like these fairly robotic-sounding voices, you can buy more natural TTS (text to speech) voices online, for example here.

For more information about listening to .pdf files, click here:

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/acrobat/articles/acr6araccessibility.html