DW Worlrd, Deutsche Welle, has a very useful web page called "Learning by Ear". It is an educational series intended for Africa, in a "radionovela" covering a wide range of topics from African history, African fables, politics, health, environment and economics- even football/soccer- to name a few. The LBE seires has pages in English, French, Portuguese and also Swahili, Amharic and Hausa. Each page has pdf transcripts and mp3's (most).
For those of you wondering: The Portuguese is African. The French is African. The English is African- big deal! I'm not going to let that keep me from acquiring loads of new vocabulary and getting better at listening comprehension. Besides, Portuguese is a world language. Yes, I'm concentrating on Brazilian Portuguese but not to the exclusion of the other variants of the same language.
So I went to the Portuguese page and downloaded the pdf transcripts and the mp3s for "Queres que te conte mais" Fábulas africanas para uma cultura de paz. The voice actors are Mozambican. I loaded the text and audio onto my kindle.
As I've said, it is also available in French, sadly, the African fables do not have French audio, just text, but the African history series does have audio and text. I made a bilingual parallel text for a friend who's learning French.
Here's how you do it:
1 open a word or openoffice doc
2 insert a 2 column 1 row table
3 copy pdf text for TL and paste in left column
4 copy pdf text for English or other language in right column
5 Start lining up as best you can
Audio download using Mozilla Firefox browser: "ctrl + u" for page source- a window pops up. Then "ctrl+f" for "find" then enter "mp3" in the box. You'll have to hit "next", most likely, until you see something like "http://..... ending in .mp3". Copy and paste this link into a new tab. Hit enter, and when the mp3 starts to load, go to your firefox tools and click "save page as" et voilà! Better instructions than mine can be had by googling "save mp3 firefox". Edit- I just realized, there's a link at the bottom of th DW player to download the mp3. Still, this is how I download mp3 from firefox when there is not an obvious link.
DW World Learning by Ear
follow the links from this Portuguese page to English, French, Amharic, Swahili and Hausa.
Edited by iguanamon on 29 March 2011 at 6:21pm
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