neilp Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5062 days ago 2 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 1 of 13 20 January 2011 at 7:02pm | IP Logged |
I have a Kindle e-reader from Amazon. The Kindle has a synthized voice i.e. text to speech. I need to learn French and I feel that the way I can learn is to first be able to read it.
I did this with welsh some years ago and it works for me. I don't need to know what all the words mean, although with French I generally know the meaning it is with the pronunciation that I have the difficulty. I would like therefore to be able to listen to a book in French being read by an actor rather than an electronic voice.
Does anyone know, is this achievable via a Kindle?
Thanks for reading.
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starrye Senior Member United States Joined 5099 days ago 172 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese
| Message 2 of 13 20 January 2011 at 7:18pm | IP Logged |
Yes it's possible. I had the original kindle when it first came out, and it did support mp3 so you could listen to audio books and podcasts. I'm assuming the newer models still do...but someone correct me if I'm wrong. You can put recorded dialogs and audio books on your kindle in mp3 format, and then listen along as you read.
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iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5267 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French)
| Message 3 of 13 20 January 2011 at 9:30pm | IP Logged |
starrye is right. I have the Kindle 3G and use it to listen to and read books in Portuguese. You must download an audio book (g search this forum "audio books") to your computer. I used Librivox go to "Advanced Search". Then go to the language drop down list and select French then hit search. Librivox usually has the e-text available for download as well. Attach your Kindle to your computer via the usb cable and move the audio files to the "Music" folder. For ease of use I rename the files so that they are in numerical sequence if need be.
Bonne chance et bon ecoute
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Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6954 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish
| Message 4 of 13 21 January 2011 at 5:36am | IP Logged |
I have a Kindle 3, and as far as I know (I've only tried it once on a German book), the
text-to-speech only works for English. When I tried it on the German text, it read
everything with English pronunciation (e.g. 'ich will' would be pronounced 'itch will '
with an English 'w'). This made the feature utterly useless for foreign language study.
However, downloading the MP3 and transcripts of short stories onto my Kindle, as others
here have suggested, has been working great. Be sure to have the MP3 player controls down
first; it's rather clunky to operate (the space bar means 'pause', the 'F' key means
'next track', etc.)
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NichtGut Groupie United States the-daily-treasure.bRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6337 days ago 65 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 5 of 13 23 January 2011 at 4:58am | IP Logged |
I use a Kindle!! I love it for language learning, here is what I like to do.
use Lingq.com
first get familiar with this awesome website
ok so:
pick an article on Lingq
I copy and paste the article into Word and save it as a txt. format so it works on the kindle.
Then download the audio that goes along with the text and upload that onto your kindle as well.
You can play the audio while reading at the same time, it is a beautiful tool to study with.
message me if you need more details on how to do this
:)
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iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5267 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French)
| Message 6 of 13 23 January 2011 at 1:33pm | IP Logged |
To convert just about any text into kindle or other ebook compatible software, get Calibre Ebook Management Software It enables you to take non-compatible formats and convert them to compatible formats. Yeah, it's not perfect. Nothing in this world is. It doesn't handle graphic intensive pdf well or multi-column pdf. I have none the less found it to be an invaluable tool.
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darkwhispersdal Senior Member Wales Joined 6045 days ago 294 posts - 363 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin
| Message 7 of 13 23 January 2011 at 3:10pm | IP Logged |
NichtGut wrote:
I use a Kindle!! I love it for language learning, here is what I like to do.
use Lingq.com
first get familiar with this awesome website
ok so:
pick an article on Lingq
I copy and paste the article into Word and save it as a txt. format so it works on the kindle.
Then download the audio that goes along with the text and upload that onto your kindle as well.
You can play the audio while reading at the same time, it is a beautiful tool to study with.
:) |
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Thanks for the tip I was wondering today if I could put LingQ stuff on my kindle
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Thomas_DC Triglot Groupie Denmark Joined 5779 days ago 58 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Danish*, English, French Studies: German, Arabic (Written)
| Message 8 of 13 23 January 2011 at 6:29pm | IP Logged |
I have a kindle, and i use it all the time for my french studies. What i really like about it is the built-in dictionary which is really effective for instant look-ups while reading (i would get bored very quickly if i had to look the words up in a book or on the internet) Another nice thing is the availability of public domain books. I read these on the kindle while listening to the audiobook on my iPod (i know that the kindle can play mp3's as well, but it seems that the software is still very undeveloped)
Amazon and othersfrench ee book catalogues are rather limited though - but if you like reading classics, it shouldn't be a problem
The text-to-speech option only works with English though.. And even with English it sounds a little odd - but it might be OK for some.
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