Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5304 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 1 of 5 12 June 2012 at 8:30pm | IP Logged |
I would like to suggest an exercise that could help push you ahead when you feel like you are making no progress or don’t know what to work on to improve.
Record yourself having a natural, unscripted conversation with a native speaker for about an hour and have a native speaker analyze your speech and point out the most common mistakes or glaring weaknesses.
The idea is that over an hour – even if that seems a bit lengthy --, it’s likely that you’ll get a good snapshot of where you’re at and any effort to synthesize your common issues will be quite effective. You can then work towards fixing those for the next little while.
I don’t know how you’ll find someone to help you, but that’s your problem ;) Actually, if anyone is interested, you could post a link in this thread and you could do an exchange with someone with a complementary language pair and analyze eachother’s recordings.
Has anyone done this or experimented with this?
I haven’t tried it per se, but I do frequently record one hour discussions and listen to myself after. I just haven’t gone out of my way to get someone to correct it.
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anamsc2 Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 4482 days ago 85 posts - 186 votes ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) Speaks: English*, Spanish, Catalan, German Studies: French
| Message 2 of 5 12 June 2012 at 9:46pm | IP Logged |
I like this idea, and I would love to try it!
However, I feel like one hour may be too long for two reasons:
1. I, personally, almost never have hour-long conversations. I have a hard time just talking to someone for an hour. Maybe I'm not that interesting :p.
2. The poor native speaker would probably have to spend at least two boring hours analyzing this recording, considering stops, rewinds, analysis, etc. That seems like a loooong time.
I think a half an hour would probably be enough to give you a good snapshot and allow you to make plenty of mistakes. Yes, it's less representative than an hour, but I honestly think it would be plenty of time, especially if you didn't try to be too careful in your speech.
I'd be glad to analyze someone's speech in English if they posted a recording in this thread, although if the recording is long I might rescind that offer!
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5304 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 3 of 5 12 June 2012 at 9:53pm | IP Logged |
Most tutoring session are about hour, so just make one session a conversation -- but of course, if your native
speaker isn't paid (not even coffee?), then I suppose a half-hour is fine.
Part of my rationale for the hour was that nothing forces the listener to cover the entire hour and they may be
quickly satisfied that certain points obviously need work, or if not, they can listen to more. Alternatively, you
yourself can trim down the hour to the most interesting 30 minutes. It's even possible to automatically remove
dead noise, and speed up by 5 to 10% to save time.
Edited by Arekkusu on 13 June 2012 at 12:22am
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tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5114 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean
| Message 4 of 5 13 June 2012 at 2:12am | IP Logged |
Late last year or maybe earlier this year there was a gentleman at this site who was studying Spanish, and in his case he would record brief monologs for Spanish speakers to analyze. I think the issue with this approach is that it is pretty time consuming, and the fact is that the person analyzing the recording might not be able to give helpful advice or suggest techniques on how the learner should correct pronunciation, improve fluidity, alter tone, etc. So probably it's better to pay an experienced tutor to listen and build a list of suggested improvements.
Edited by tibbles on 13 June 2012 at 3:05am
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5304 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) ![](/images/pokal.2.jpg) Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 5 of 5 13 June 2012 at 2:43am | IP Logged |
tibbles wrote:
Late last year or maybe earlier this year there was a gentleman at this site who was
studying Spanish, and in his case he would record brief monologs for Spanish speakers to analyze. I think
the issue with this approach is that it is pretty time consuming, and the fact is that the person analyzing the
recording might not be able to give helpful advice or suggest techniques on how the learner should correct
pronunciation, improve fluidity, alter tone, etc. So probably it's better to pay an experienced tutor to listen and
built a list of suggested improvements. |
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There are lots of tutors looking for work; paying for a one-time analysis is an interesting option.
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