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Make your Pimsleur courses using this! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Hashimi Senior Member Oman Joined 6260 days ago 362 posts - 529 votes  Speaks: Arabic (Written)* Studies: English, Japanese | Message 1 of 16 28 October 2009 at 12:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I remembered this program after reading Rikyu-san's last thread "Pimsleur-style Sanskrit Program Project." I have no interest in Sanskrit, but I think this program will help you, Rikyu-san, sprachefin (she had posted another thread with a similar title) and the others who wish to make their own Pimsleur courses. Make your own Pimsleur courses using this great free program! Some people like Pimsleur courses, others (including me) think they are boring. But the idea itself is very effective. This program uses the "graduated-interval recall" method published by Pimsleur in 1967. It's like audio flashcards that appear in a special pattern designed to help you remember. Pimsleur courses courses use several techniques (they say some are patented), but this particular 1967 idea is now in the public domain so this program can use it to help you learn your own choice of vocabulary or sentences. 
mike 789 from this forum have posted before about this program. He said: "It will let you make your own version of spaced repetition audio similar to what Pimsleur does. The program lets you play audio snippets (either words or phrases, it doesn't matter) at about the intervals Pimsleur published in his paper "A Memory Schedule" of: 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, 2 years. Of course using this program to make your own Pimsleur lessons is not as easy as just popping a Pimsleur CD into your player. The program does take some time to understand how to operate, especially for content entry. As your first step you need content. You'll need to decide what sentences you want to learn, and how many in each lesson. The latter point is worth emphasizing. If you've felt Pimsleur doesn't go fast enough now you can choose how many new items to introduce per lesson. You can come up with the sentences (or words) on your own, perhaps decide to use ones from an existing program such as Assimil, take them out of textbooks, etc. If you've found content that you've always wished was available in the Pimsleur instructional format of spaced repetition, now you can make it happen! Next you need to get your sentences into sound files. The program has a text-to-speech synthesizer built in, but it doesn't sound that great. So you'll probably want to either find a friendly native speaker to record the sentences for you, record them yourself in your voice, or extract them from the other audio source if that is the base of your lessons. At this point the program can play your lessons directly, or can create them in exportable format such as MP3 so that you can carry them around with you just like the ordinary Pimsleur programs." From the programmer's website: "This program gives only audio, so you concentrate on pronunciation (so you can listen during daily routines e.g. washing etc, since you don't need to look at the screen.) You can add words to your collection at any time, and this program can manage collections of thousands of words. It can also help you rehearse longer texts such as poems. If possible, prepare some audio prompts such as "say again" and "do you remember how to say". These can be real recordings or synthesized text." Before you download the program, please say thank you to its programmer, Silas Brown. He is a partially-sighted computer scientist at Cambridge University (he has cortical visual impairment.) If you want to know what does the Web look to him, click here. Now, to the program's page: Gradint If you found this program a little complicated, you can try another simple one called Audio Lesson Studio by cb4960. Click here But note that it is more straight forward program not based on Pimsluer algorithm (or any other type of scheduling for that matter) but more geared toward shadowing and question-answer approaches. Lesson format is left up to the user, but preset lesson formats will be available (see below for examples of lesson formats). All data are entered into an Excel-like grid control to allow the audio to add/remove/move/shuffle the data to suit individual needs. Naturally, the user can manually enter data using the same control. The program utilizes TTS should the user not have a "real" audio source to work with. TTS is also used to create the silence (allowing the user to shadow or say the answer). Silence is based on the length of the previous line multiplied by a user defined value with optional minumum length. The user should be able to preview all or part of a lesson from the grid interface. As far as output goes, the user can choose to either group the lesson into one or multiple audio files based on some number of minutes or some number of lines. Example lesson format 1 (shadowing-type): (1) Audio from target language (using provided audio file or TTS if file not provided) (2) Silence (based on duration of (1) * multiplier) (3) Audio from target language (4) Silence (based on duration of (3) * multiplier) Example lesson format 2 (Pimsluer-style): (1) "Say" (narrator voice using TTS) (2) Audio from native language (3) Silence (4) Audio from target language (5) Silence (6) Audio from target language (7) Silence Example lesson format 3 (Q & A): (1) Question audio (2) Silence (3) Answer audio (4) Silence 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6051 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 2 of 16 28 October 2009 at 4:54am | IP Logged | ||
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You can add audio to Anki's cards and achieve the same effect, but with more options.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 16 29 October 2009 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't believe that's the case. What they're talking about above is making a course for "offline" use -- ie without needing a computer. Last time I checked, Anki didn't have the option to generate audio files for use away from the computer, and while Anki might run on the iPhone, it doesn't run on a £30 Chinese no-name MP3 player or a car stereo.... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ALS Senior Member United States Joined 5805 days ago 104 posts - 131 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Finnish, Russian | Message 4 of 16 29 October 2009 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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This looks great and I'm going to try it as soon as possible. I know my way around audio editing enough that I can lift words/sentences from my Michel Thomas CDs so I might work on that later today.
What I'd really like and have been looking for is basically this exact thing but with text instead of audio. I learn better through reading than through audio and, as much as I like Anki, using an SRS is a bit too 'high maintenance' for me and the fact that the earliest interval starts at 8+ hours (Supermemo for Palm starts at 24 hours) seems to be counter productive. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6539 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 16 29 October 2009 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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This program sounds like a homebrew comprehensive audio program could become commonplace in a few
years. Who knows, perhaps students taking SLA classes will construct their own programs using Brown's software instead of just reading about SLA theory and not producing anything? Some thoughts on the intervals: If one didn't finish the long list of intervals in a particular lesson, wouldn't one have to start the CD from the beginning every time one wanted to study? If you take a break between the intervals, then wouldn't this screw up the intervals? Instead of just 1 hour between the prompts, it could be an entire day. The intervals tell you to review the prompt at 5 hours after the 1 hour mark, so how does one overcome this problem? The Pimsleur CDs(not the actual study published in the 60s) didn't follow an exponential pattern. Maybe the developers realized that an exponential pattern is extremely time consuming. Are the intervals primarily about being efficient as possible, not so much about whether getting the prompts down the correct intervals? If this is the case, then Pimsleur's study published in the 60s is kinda useless because the study was about memory recall, not necessary about efficiency...although that could've been on his mind. But I suppose I'll have to wait until someone makes the course using Brown's software before I can make hasty generalizations. Edited by Kugel on 29 October 2009 at 5:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 6 of 16 29 October 2009 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Of course, it's overstating it to call this "Pimsleur-like" courses, as it misses two of the important points of the Pimsleur method:
1) Coherent situational conversations. (Which annoy me anyway -- they always seemed unnaturally stiff. No madam, I do not have reals, I have dollars.) 2) Giving consideration to individual vocab and structural elements when considering repetition. So the number of times I say "the hotel is over there" should be related to the number of times I need to say "the restaurant is here". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6539 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 16 30 October 2009 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||
So the structural elements(I take this to mean syntax) should play a greater role than vocab when it comes to what should be plugged into the intervals? I think it would be really boring if one prompt had "Do you have dollars" which followed "Do you have shekels". The prompts would indeed have to be more than just acquiring new vocab, unless the vocab itself was grammatically important. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 16 30 October 2009 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
That is not what I said, not by a long shot. I used the words "and", after all. My point is that the program sees each prompt as a single, independent entity, so it will happily produce "Do you have dollars" followed by "Do you have shekels" because it doesn't realise that they are related. My point wasn't that you should have to say them both because they're related, but that you shouldn't have to say them both because they're related. I've been trying out the software -- I generated several Welsh lessons from my university materials and popped them on my MP3 player. I was quite disappointed at the amount of editing I had to do to, though -- the software left an awful lot of unnecessary silences.... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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