Need some help finding a TTS program that will read both English and Japanese when it’s in the same sentence.

The title mostly says it all.

I have ADHD and I’ve noticed that my eyes strain really fast when I read too much off of a screen. So I’ve been using basic TTS programs for a while if there is a large amount of text on the screen I want to get through and not have a massive headache later.

Well when I started learning Japanese, mostly self-taught, I noticed that TTS programs will just skip the Japanese text in a sentence.

To borrow a sentence from the Tofugu website:

Instead of reading the whole sentence as it is written it will simply skip over the Japanese and keep on reading.

So this:

“彼 is a third-person pronoun used for males, like “he” in English, and 彼女 is the female version, like “she” in English.”

ends up sounding like this:

“is a third-person pronoun used for males, like “he” in English, and is the female version, like “she” in English.”

I’m not looking for something that is super fantastic quality and natural sounding just something that will read the text on the screen and will read the Japanese with it. I don’t even care if it has to switch to a different voice in the middle of the sentence. So far my search has left me fruitless, and even some of the features that you have to pay for don’t seem to do what I’m looking for. I’m not a programmer so I don’t know how much of a mountain a task like this would be so maybe I’m a cat chasing a laser pointer expecting a rat when I catch the red dot. Or I’m just not searching the right terms or looking under the right rocks. But I figured you guys are smarter than I am and may have looked for the same things. Either way, thank you for reading through to the end.

1 comment
  1. You have to really watch out if it reads kanji correctly, especially because it seems you’re going to make it read Japanese without context.

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