carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5986 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian
| Message 1 of 6 05 August 2011 at 10:14pm | IP Logged |
Is the audio for this course the same as the audio on the free FSI language courses website or has it been rerecorded? If it is the same, is the audio quality any better?
Edited by carlonove on 06 August 2011 at 12:32am
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DavidW Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6526 days ago 318 posts - 458 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Italian, Persian, Malay Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese, German, Urdu
| Message 2 of 6 06 August 2011 at 2:43am | IP Logged |
The Barron's course and the FSI site have the same audio material, but the Barron's
version is better quality, at least my copy of Barrons level 1 on CD.
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carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5986 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian
| Message 3 of 6 06 August 2011 at 2:53am | IP Logged |
Would you say the increase in quality is worth spending the money for the Barron's edition? I'm up to Unit 5 at the moment, and I can't distinguish the suffixes in sentences that are not fully transcribed in the text.
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HenryMW Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5174 days ago 125 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French Studies: Modern Hebrew
| Message 4 of 6 06 August 2011 at 6:18am | IP Logged |
With one exception, I've had no trouble with the free material. Is it your speakers?
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carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5986 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian
| Message 5 of 6 06 August 2011 at 7:04am | IP Logged |
No, I'm editing out all of the English, German prompts, and gaps from the audio to make better material for shadowing, so there's a lot less time to process what's being said. The article and noun endings are difficult or sometimes impossible to distinguish on the grainier recordings if the correct responses are not included in the text.
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DavidW Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6526 days ago 318 posts - 458 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Italian, Persian, Malay Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese, German, Urdu
| Message 6 of 6 06 August 2011 at 11:49pm | IP Logged |
I remember having difficulty distinguishing between certain endings on those tapes, like eine/einer.. but they sound quite similar anyway to me. I will take a look at the online files to see if I can clean them up a little. I have asked in the past for higher-bitrate recordings to work on in the forums in that site, but I never got a response.
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