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Thoughts on "slowly spoken" material? | ||
Tags: Voice Recordings | Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Randwulf Newbie United States Joined 4823 days ago 32 posts - 93 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 17 30 March 2012 at 5:18am | IP Logged |
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Good? Bad?
The goal of slowly spoken material is of course to gently acclimate you to the grammar, vocabulary, and sounds of the language so that you can eventually make a fairly easy transition to native-speed material. Does it perform this transition role well? I'm sort of afraid to use slowly spoken materials because I fear that, while perhaps becoming more familiar with the grammar and such than I could from native-speed material, I would become too used to the slow speed. With slowly spoken material (written at a native level) I can usually understand just about everything on the first listen. With native speed material, I can usually understand less than half. With native material I'll then listen again while reading along with a transcript. Then I'll do another unaided listen and be able to pick out the words well enough. So essentially, I can cover about three times as much (probably more like 2 times as much all considered) slowly spoken material per unit time than native-speed material. And that larger base of exposure is tempting. Edited by Randwulf on 30 March 2012 at 5:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6082 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 2 of 17 30 March 2012 at 10:51am | IP Logged |
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Personally, I like to use slowly spoken material at the start, mainly to hear the words clearly enunciated. One of the first courses I bought was "Teach Yourself Hungarian". The course was proud of the fact that all the dialogues were recorded at near native speed. This made it extremely hard to use, and I was left unsure about huge tracts of Hungarian pronunciation. It wasn't until I used Assimil and the FSI basic course that I started to grasp it.
However, once I become familiar with a language, I like to use recordings at native speed. At native speed, I start with familiar dialects by professional speakers, like audio books and the news. After that I'll move onto more natural recordings encountered in television shows and films. I find recent films much harder to follow than films from an earlier period. E.g. As regards the Russian language, the film Solaris (1972) is easier to follow than Daywatch (2006). Edited by DaraghM on 30 March 2012 at 10:54am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7136 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 3 of 17 30 March 2012 at 12:10pm | IP Logged |
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Just like more elementry books are helpful for building up confidence and stamina in reading, slower spoken sources allow you to listen for longer periods getting more out of the source than something written or spoken entirely for natives at full speed with the usual vocal reductions we all use. You have to walk before you can run.
There are multiple approaches to starting with more elementry or comprehensible material and I think all of them have value and their place. * Material spoken slowly or written in a "simplified" language (Simple English, Simple French, etc) * Material with a transcript (if audio) or audio (if a book or podcast, etc) * Material that is trying to explain something, such as a "self help" book. The various approaches to self help aren't rocket science and most aren't new, so that sort of material is easier to grasp. * Material that explains itself, such as http://ssl4you.blogspot.com/ or http://spanishpodcast.org/. * Material that was originally in your native language and translated to your target language may have an easier syntax or word order than something written by a native in the target language. This applies equally for audiobooks as it does for regular books. * Educational material, such as TV, the Discovery channel, the Science channel, etc can be easier. One can start with simpler goals like being able to comprehend well a broadcast in simple or slow language. When that becomes effortless, one can set the goal of understanding one that is spoken very fast with a transcript and translation, and listen multiple times. With that fast native material, the goal can be to gradually remove the "crutches" such as the translation, the transcript, and the multiple listenings. Edited by luke on 30 March 2012 at 12:11pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4796 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 17 30 March 2012 at 6:20pm | IP Logged |
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When I first started learning Spanish I used to listen to the web site "News in Slow Spanish". In a matter of just a few weeks, however, it became very annoying and frustrating to me. In just those few weeks they were already talking way too slow for me, and it was frustrating waiting for them to finish the next word. Plus, I wasn't learning how to listen to real Spanish.
I found that for myself listening to simple Spanish spoken at normal speed was much more helpful. I could go from that to intermediate level grammar and vocabulary, at normal speed, and then to advanced vocabulary and grammar, at normal speed. There are audio recordings available at all different levels at normal speed. Listening to slow Spanish doesn't really train your ear to hear the sounds of normal Spanish. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5239 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 5 of 17 30 March 2012 at 7:00pm | IP Logged |
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I find it most effective to use relatively slow native material targeted at native audiences. Not ones for learners of the language. If the material is too fast then I slow it down on my computer.
"News in Slow Spanish" is probably the worst listening material I've encountered due to the way the lady artificially distorts everything she says in order to sound nice. Unstressed syllables get stressed, pauses appear in weird places like middle of words... I wouldn't want to speak that way :S 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4599 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 6 of 17 30 March 2012 at 8:20pm | IP Logged |
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-Colloquial Tamil- (the course) is not ''slowly spoken'' at all. They speak 10 times faster than actors in Tamil movies :( Edited by Medulin on 30 March 2012 at 8:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6528 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 17 30 March 2012 at 9:17pm | IP Logged |
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I feel the same about selkouutiset in slow Finnish. I also find the early Assimil lessons annoying and I can't shadow them.
I think it's better to use a transcript than to listen to slow speech. BTW some of the best quality audiobooks are read quite slowly.. you know, with proper intonation etc. The vocabulary is likely to be a problem here but parallel texts can help. luke, great list! Just not necessarily "translated from YOUR native language" :) As a non-native speaker of English who's a bit annoyed by the amount of good stuff originally in English, I prefer translations from English :P 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4619 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 8 of 17 30 March 2012 at 9:32pm | IP Logged |
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I like to listen to full-speed materials even at an early stage. This may in part be because I just like listening to foreign languages that I might not know at all, just to hear them. But I find that by listening to, e.g., a full-speed news broadcast, where I may only be able to pick out words here and there, I get used to the sounds of full-speed spoken language, and I also get used to putting together pieces of a puzzle at high speed to get partial information when I can't get full information. Sometimes I'll concentrate on picking out words, other times I'll focus on making sure I pick up the phonemic sequences (e.g., before I've learned a lot of words, or if I have a big gap between words I recognize written and spoken).
Naturally, this is not enough by itself for comprehensive learning from a basic level, and I also use slow, pedantic instructional materials. But I think the only reason why slowly-spoken materials are a problem for some people is because they're too proud or too scared to even TRY listening to stuff that they can't really understand, at least for more than a minute or two. As usual, I go for the "all-of-the-above" approach to learning materials. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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