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Older Learner tries Assimil for Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 49 of 175 10 March 2012 at 7:20pm | IP Logged |
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Can you use Audacity's "Truncate Silence" filter (or whatever it's called these days) in
batch mode? We really need to figure out an easy way to remove pauses from an Assimil course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5564 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 50 of 175 10 March 2012 at 7:51pm | IP Logged |
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Sfuqua - don't apologise for such posts. Without being sadistic, I really enjoyed your
expressions of frustration. It gave me comfort that I was not the only person who has worked through Assimil (or whatever) only to find that I just have not grasped the point. Your honesty and the revealing of your thought processes are a real benefit to me, and, I am sure, to many others here. Edited by Elexi on 10 March 2012 at 7:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 51 of 175 11 March 2012 at 1:37am | IP Logged |
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I haven't figured out how to use Audacity in batch mode. This would be a wonderful addition.
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| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 52 of 175 11 March 2012 at 1:58am | IP Logged |
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Assimil, out of the box, using any version of the "official instructions," does not ever "force" the learner to produce language at the speed needed for conversation with native speakers. You learn to process print and speech passively at something close to native speaker speeds, but you never actually have to produce language fast enough to hold up your end of a conversation, which we all know is a skill closer to table tennis than it is to chess. I produce Spanish, actually quite a bit of Spanish, at "chess" speeds currently.
Shadowing may provide this "missing" practice. A Spanish speaking girlfriend would be more fun, but I doubt if my wife would approve, even if an old fuddy duddy like me could find one :) steve 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 53 of 175 11 March 2012 at 2:33am | IP Logged |
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There's something in Audacity called File->Edit Chains for batch processing that looks good so far. It seems to be truncating the silences, but I haven't listened to the results yet... Edited by sfuqua on 11 March 2012 at 2:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 54 of 175 11 March 2012 at 4:20am | IP Logged |
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Yup, go in and hit File-->Edit Chains and set up the commands you want to do. Click Add under the left column, and then choose a name for your new chain: "shadowizeAssimil" is what I called mine. Then, under the big space on the right side, click on Insert to add an action. I used the command TruncateSilence with the defaults, which isn't too bad (you have to breath fast between turns :). I also Inserted ExportOgg since I was too lazy to find a LAME encoder.
I suppose I lost a little quality, but I can't really tell much difference, and using ogg really made the files small. My android phone likes ogg files just fine. When you're done adding commands, click on OK at the bottom. To use the chain, go to File-->Apply Chain select your chain and then click on Apply to Files. Select the files you want to include, ctl-A will get everything in the directory and then click Open. Your processed files will wind up in a little folder in the same directory called "cleaned." Then you have a bunch of Assimil files read to use for shadowing... I wish I'd figured this out before I did 20 one by one :) steve 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 55 of 175 11 March 2012 at 10:01am | IP Logged |
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I enjoyed reading your posts too Steve. It's nice to see that you have kept to your original plan pretty well. I think it's a solid approach and will continue to be interested in finding out how your experiment turns out. I think finishing Assimil Spanish with Ease will give you a nice foundation. Good work! I'm an older fellow too and the advantage we have is discipline.
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| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 56 of 175 13 March 2012 at 4:10am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the support everyone :)
I played around with shadowing this weekend, seeing what kind of schedule I would use to finish Spanish with Ease. I only shadowed the first couple of lessons in the book, first shadowing while reading the L2 in the book, and then shadowing blind. I played around with "singing along" with the recording. Even though I was very familiar with this material, I didn't get bored. It was sort of fun trying to match exactly what the speakers were saying, and pretty soon the passages were ringing in my brain. I thought it was interesting, but not amazing or anything; I spent maybe two hours all together. Explosion. Breakthrough. Shock. Quantum leap. The next time I started to speak Spanish to someone, I was at a whole new level. My B/V stopped being an English B and started being something else, not English B, not English V, but something else that sounds Spanish to me. The prosody of my speech seemed completely different, much more Spanish. The words I needed to say seemed to be much easier to find. The grammar seemed much more transparent. Understand, I hadn't leaped ahead to C1 or anything, but I was definitely better, including many, many aspects of Spanish that weren't in the two lessons I shadowed. I'm still too slow and halting, but much closer to normal now. Best of all, the people in the telenovela's seem to be speaking more clearly also. Clearly, the months of Spanish I've done in the passive and active waves are a big part of it, but a couple of hours of shadowing seems to have released a lot of what was stuck in my head before. I am sort of stunned. What will things be like after a month of this...? I hope I can remember this day the next time I get discouraged. I'm very encouraged. :) steve Edited by sfuqua on 13 March 2012 at 4:15am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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