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Using thousands of audio sentences? | ||
Tags: Audio-lingual | Translation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| aquablue Senior Member United States Joined 6317 days ago 150 posts - 172 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 1 of 29 16 August 2011 at 1:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm interested in learning a target language by listening to thousands of sentances followed by their English translation. The problem is, I don't know where I can find thousands of sentances in audio format followed by the English translation in various languages, are they available? The whole point of this approach is that I wouldn't have to read so I can study while driving, exercising, etc. Anybody know if these resources are out there? Edited by aquablue on 16 August 2011 at 2:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4983 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese | Message 2 of 29 16 August 2011 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The best way is making the sentances (hereafter referred to as sentences) by yourself. It will contain the sentences of your own choice so it'll be unique. One might learn self-made stuff even better. As for the difficulty of the speech of your target language, one might like to use some text-to-speech applications. If you just can't think of perfect sentences in your target language, buy a phrase book and get the sentences out of it.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 29 16 August 2011 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, just as long as the sentences are actually good examples. But only someone competent in the language can identify good examples.... 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6374 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 29 16 August 2011 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Assuming that someone uses a reasonable source of translated sentences (say, a typical book translated by a human being), a corpus of thousands of pairs makes it fairly difficult to entirely leave out major concepts and words, and also helps smooth out the effect of the almost inevitable minor translation glitches. For intensively studying small amounts of sentences, or for studying specific points, you are of course correct. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5316 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 29 16 August 2011 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Assuming you did find a good set of examples, how would you make sure you have the right pronunciation? And why bother recording yourself if you can just read it outloud? I don't think you'd gain any benefit in listening comprehension over actually saying it outloud. In the end, it's just rote learning, just like SRS. Edited by Arekkusu on 16 August 2011 at 6:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| aquablue Senior Member United States Joined 6317 days ago 150 posts - 172 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 6 of 29 16 August 2011 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was talking about pre-made sentence decks with native audio recordings combined with
English translation so I would not have to record my own voice! I'm sure if there were a large corpus of sentences covering the most common words and phrases, that using a self- made deck wouldn't be much more useful at the end of the day. I also do not want to read the sentences since I would be doing activities that may preclude that. Also, I have no desire to undergo the arduous task of mining texts for thousands of sentences myself, as I simply do not have the time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6374 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 29 16 August 2011 at 7:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There are certainly small corpora in this format out there. I've seen some phone apps which have stories in Chinese and English, and interleave the audio for each on a sentence by sentence basis, but they're for very short stories; a typical story has a couple dozen sentences.
The easiest option I can think of is listening to one chapter of an audiobook at a time, then listening to it again in the other language. It's not as good as having a large set of interleaved sentences, but there is a huge range of available material and it takes almost no preparatory work. Shorter chapters are probably an advantage for this, so religious texts with recordings in multiple languages which frequently have sections which are a page or less long might be worth considering. From experience, I can attest that repeated listening (just in L2) to audiobook chapters I particularly like and have grown to know well, is useful for learning grammar, how to put together sentences, vocabulary, and also with becoming more familiar and more deeply internalizing each of these things. This requires some time upfront, but is well-suited to studying when I can only listen. It's also independent of the length of the chapter. I'd love to hear of a large and suitable corpus where the recordings are already at the granularity of sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| aquablue Senior Member United States Joined 6317 days ago 150 posts - 172 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 8 of 29 16 August 2011 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks. Any good sites for these multilingual audiobooks?
1 person has voted this message useful |
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