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Accents and sound quality | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| glidefloss Senior Member United States Joined 5971 days ago 138 posts - 154 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 7 21 July 2014 at 5:24am | IP Logged |
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I wish I could upload a small sample of my audiobooks somewhere, but I don't know how to cut down the size.
When you're still at the beginner stage, do you find accents and sound quality to hugely influence your comprehension? For instance, I can understand one Harry Potter book on it's own now, after having used it for L-R, because it has a specific type of accent, and good crisp clear sound quality; when I listen to it, all the words are 'separate,' even words I don't yet know. But for other audiobooks, there is a much different accent. For instance, this is something of a difficult accent for me, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lmJqUsa-ng it sounds king of mumbly 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5062 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 2 of 7 21 July 2014 at 5:37am | IP Logged |
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I have the same problem, and it's unfortunately not limited to the beginner stage. When you listen to your native
language, your brain fills in a lot of information that is ambiguous in the sound itself because of noise, poor sound quality, or other complicating factors. Luckily, you have pretty constrained expectations about what the words could be, so you not only understand them, but also don't even recognize that you filled them in yourself and didn't really hear them. In a foreign language even at advanced level, it can happen that sentences you would normally understand with no problem become unintelligible if the sound quality is reduced. Despite the fact that you know all the words and grammar, you've heard them perhaps only 1/20 as many times, so the top-down expectations are not nearly as strong, and your ability to fill in the missing bits is way weaker if for some reason you don't hear some bits clearly. At the beginner to intermediate levels, a low-quality sound recording is usually almost entirely unintelligible. Don't waste your time with one- you won't learn many new words if the only ones you can make out are the ones you already know very well. Listen, listen, listen, and it will get better, albeit slowly. In the meantime, you will learn faster with high quality recordings. P.S. A very similar effect occurs for me when I listen to recordings about topics I know nothing about. Edited by robarb on 21 July 2014 at 5:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| glidefloss Senior Member United States Joined 5971 days ago 138 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 3 of 7 21 July 2014 at 5:41am | IP Logged |
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I do find I learn better with the higher quality, clearer recording. Unfortunately, I can't for the life of me find a place
to buy literary Spanish audiobooks. Audible seems to have a lot of abridged versions. Also, a lot of youtube audiobooks seem to be read by a computer program. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5062 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 4 of 7 21 July 2014 at 5:55am | IP Logged |
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You could try Librivox for free public domain audiobooks, but the sound quality spans the entire range, and the
books are all 100+ years old. Could be useful if you're really concentrating on literary Spanish. But I'm sure someone on here knows where to buy Spanish contemporary lit audiobooks. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| glidefloss Senior Member United States Joined 5971 days ago 138 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 5 of 7 21 July 2014 at 6:22am | IP Logged |
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I'm not sure whether I should use this or not. While I was doing some L-R, here is what I heard from the book while
reading the English. These are probably all words I've heard before, though, so I'm considering your point about not learning unfamiliar words. Sorry, I know this has errors, but you can see I recognized some of the words from the sentence that in English went, "Put it this way, Potter, said Mad Eye Moody finally, they say old Mad Eye is obsessed with catching dark wizards, but I'm nothing compared to Barty Crouch. ====mira potter firmanente disait que ojo loco que con obsesiandao atrapado magos tenebrosos ..ojo loco es nado .. nada de barty crouch... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4447 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 6 of 7 21 July 2014 at 6:24am | IP Logged |
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In English, it takes a while to get used to the difference between the English & American accent along
with differences in words & phrases. In Chinese you find Mandarin speakers in the "Beijing" accent with a lot of "er" sounds at the end of words vs. those in southern China & Taiwan (often refer to as having a neutral accent). And there are some differences in words & phrases between China & Taiwan as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4625 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 7 of 7 24 July 2014 at 10:48am | IP Logged |
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It's good to have a variety of accents in audio sources because that reflects real life. That said, it needs to be
kept within reason. Making the dialogue too difficult for the listener to understand is counter productive. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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