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How do you modify standard courses? why? | ||
Tags: Language Program | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Normunds Pentaglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5965 days ago 86 posts - 112 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, French, English, Russian, German Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian | Message 1 of 10 03 February 2011 at 7:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd be interested to hear what people are doing to "improve" their existing course material.
I, for example, am adding pauses and repetitions to the recordings, and I find it works very nicely. I've done this with several courses I've been using over last few years such as Assimil and FSI and like this approach. In that way I can listen more carefully and I do not need to stop and rewind all the time. And I have a pause to repeat and thus develop production (I think I do :-) Just a few days ago somebody was checking about an idea to add English prompts in a plain target language recording of Assimil. Anybody's been doing something similar? What is your impression then? Another guy, I recently read an older thread, just opposite to me, removed all pauses from Agostini course and was very happy with the result. Why, I don't know - maybe otherwise it was below his level. What else are people doing? Maybe not only with recordings? Edited by Normunds on 03 February 2011 at 7:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 10 03 February 2011 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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The only thing that I've done so far is to divide the audio into as many tracks as feasible. In many older courses especially ones coming with cassettes only, it's a real pain when I can't get access to a particular section for quick review or repetition without rewinding or fast-forwarding. Whenever necessary I've used Audacity to break up ripped audio into several tracks. For example, I ripped the original cassettes of FSI Conversational Finnish as .wav and then used Audacity to convert them to .mp3 after having divided the original audio into several tracks with each new track containing just one dialogue, exercise or text read aloud. I then rearranged the tracks into albums for every chapter. This means that every album/chapter consists of at least 10 tracks varying each from 10 seconds to several minutes. I can thus skip to the section in a chapter for repetition or review with ease on my MP3 player. Even though creating this was very tedious, it's worth it when I can skip to or repeat the desired dialogue/exercise/monologue instead of rewinding or fast-forwarding through a twenty-minute block of audio just as if it were a CD with one long track or cassette.
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| 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 10 03 February 2011 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I did a course in Welsh last year, and I didn't feel like there was enough practice and most of the exercises struck me as a little mindless, so I ripped individual phrases from the accompanying CDs and plugged them into GradInt. I passed the course in the end.
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| Normunds Pentaglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5965 days ago 86 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Latvian*, French, English, Russian, German Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian | Message 4 of 10 04 February 2011 at 12:19am | IP Logged | ||
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@Chung Just a technical comment/question - I think Audacity has an option to "export selection", so instead of splitting up wav, you should be able to export piece by piece straight to MP3. Else Audacity is not great at splitting, no? I think there was some program that let you split up MP3 file directly.
@Cainntear I've seen you already mentioning Gradint in this forum. And it's pretty similar to what I was planning to write for my own practice :-) I wonder - how did you use it? You split up the text and recorded the English version? It looks that it's enough to type English and get machine generated version, right? Or you did get English already as a part in your recording? You used Audacity as a tool or is there something better? If you do not have the prompt? what happens? will it just sound off the sample? can you use it even in such a mode? think will have to try it some day soon :-) But it ties you of course to computer. The recorded version is just a practice run, you do not get back data for repetition thing. Audacity is pretty capable thing - it does a lot. I've used it to clean up recordings ripped from cassettes, but right for splitting up it does not feel very handy. Or I maybe do not know how to do it efficiently :-/ Edited by Normunds on 04 February 2011 at 12:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 10 04 February 2011 at 1:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Normunds, this is how I create split tracks.
With cassettes: 1) I play the audio on a portable boombox and with a standard 3.5mm cable link the boombox's headphone port with the line-in/microphone port on my CPU. 2) I use Audacity to record this audio input (each side of the cassette holds about 22 minutes' worth of audio) 3) I mark track divisions as necessary in the audio as viewed on Audacity's time-scale 4) I export my work as .mp3 at a suitable compression rate using "Export Multiple" 5) I use Tagscanner to create tags for each .mp3 file. With CDs: 1) I rip the CD with audiograbber or Windows Media Player as .wav rather than .mp3. In many instances (especially with older courses or semi-professional courses), the publishers put the minimum amount of tracks. For example if you buy a FSI course from a third-party seller, each track on the CD is often about 25 minutes long which means that the reseller just recorded the audio and inserted track divisions which match the original layout on the cassette. Therefore a two-sided cassette would turn up as a CD with two tracks (i.e. one track per side of the cassette). You can see how this can be annoying for someone who wants to find or review some dialogue or exercise that's say 17 minutes into the track. If a re-seller really wanted to "add value", it could have re-divided the audio by creating more track divisions which correspond to each dialogue, drill or monologue in the course. Thus instead of having just 2 tracks on the CD, there would now be 30 or more tracks. Some of the newer courses from Teach Yourself and Colloquial are set up in just this way, so that it's much easier for you to review an audio selection or repeat it as necessary. 2) I open the ripped .wav file in Audacity which converts it to something which I can edit. 3) As with the cassettes' audio, I go through the audio with Audacity and mark track divisions on the time-scale as necessary. 4) I export my work as .mp3 at a suitable compression rate using "Export Multiple" 5) I use Tagscanner to create tags for each .mp3 file. *** As far as I know there's no satisfactory and automated way in Audacity to split tracks (for example, if I want to split a long dialogue into two tracks for easier access or repetition while learning, I have to make that split myself using "Add Label"). For sure Audacity has the option "Export Selection", but why do the job piecemeal when I can take about an hour's worth of audio, split it up as I see fit, and then export all of the audio with its new divisions via "Export Multiple"? 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 10 04 February 2011 at 11:03am | IP Logged | ||
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I tend to use export selection in Audacity myself.
With GradInt, you can import all your clips (by copying them into a folder) and there's an inbuilt function that lets you record your own prompts, or you can enter the prompts as text. GradInt will only play a sample when it has the corresponding sample in the other language. (If you want to generate a target-language-only set of repetitions, just add in an empty wav file with the correct name.)
Not true. GradInt generates the same "lessons" whether you do them live or recorded. Unlike SRS programs, there is no scoring, it just repeats and revises material at precalculated intervals. So if you wanted to, you could put in a thousand samples in one go, hit the "generate lesson" button hundreds of times and make a whole year's worth of "lessons", then never look at the software again. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6471 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 7 of 10 04 February 2011 at 11:14am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm using mp3DirectCut to split Assimil dialogs sentence by sentence. Then I add the mp3s
to an Anki deck, where I also put the target language and source language text. Whenever I study the sentences this way, I also automatically hear the mp3, giving me a better feel for the language and its pronunciation. Now when I see the English prompt I often already hear the sentence in my head. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Normunds Pentaglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5965 days ago 86 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Latvian*, French, English, Russian, German Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian | Message 8 of 10 04 February 2011 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||
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thanks guys for this interesting input.
@Chung - thanks for the detailed description. I missed that bit about labels that can be used with export multiple. I've been using them to mark cut points and then manually selecting between labels and doing export selected :-/ no wonder I thought it's not very convenient :-) @Cainntear - ugh, interesting, but then I guess I will go on with my tool as I want to have it SRS like; and make available on phone. Just repeating, then I could just listen the same texts over and over as I'm doing it now. Ok, the difference is that it's meant to be cut on word/short phrase level.. with translation. hm, kinda sounds good, but I'm sure I will end up in the same trap as with the text based SRS. It's good at some point, but I feel that in the long run the best is try enforce the words and phrases in context by listening/reading a lot; or going through another and another course :-) And if some words do not show up in this effort, then maybe they are not that important after all... Right now I'm trying more re-think what makes sense to do when learning that grab and learn a lot.
Right "mp3DirectCut" was the program I was trying to remember. As for the process itself - it must really take a lot of time to prepare it this way. Anki can easily import bunch of file as a base for cards? or you have to attach them manually one-by-one. All this sounds to be an enormous work. Maybe you can share your decks? I'm using mnemosyne as an SRS program, but there are no good ways to automate this kind of import. Text wordlists yes, but not soundfiles (I think) Edited by Normunds on 04 February 2011 at 11:41am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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