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Quebec/Canadian French practice tool | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5275 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 6 01 October 2011 at 3:34am | IP Logged |
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For those interested in or studying Quebec/Canadian French but having trouble finding material for listening practice with transcripts, I have uploaded a collection of 612 audio files to my web server and created a small web application for playing them. Several people have asked for a copy of the collection but at almost 600 MB it is too big to email.
Unfortunately the application I created does NOT work on the Firefox web browser, only on Safari, Chrome or IE9. It has something to do with the jPlayer audio plugin failing to fallback from HTML5 audio to Flash audio. I do not have any time to investigate this problem now as I am starting an immersion program in Quebec City Monday plus I hate web development. The audio files are all taken from news broadcasts but are not spoken by professional news broadcasters. The cool thing is that it features 21 different speakers, 11 men and 10 women, all with a different voice and rate of speech, some fast, some slow but all native Québécois. Also, as they are news stories, there is no slang or highly informal street language so you can get used to the accent with vocabulary and grammar that is familiar to you. To use it I recommend that you turn off the text display and just listen and then show the text if there are words you do not recognize. If you have difficulty understanding, you can enable 'repeat' and let the track loop a few times and then show the text and press 'Next' to move on. You can also press 'Again' at any time to start the track form the beginning. Sorry that I don't have time to debug any problems with this right now but if you have Safari, Chrome or IE9 feel free to give it a try and let me know if you think it is useful. http://microsnout.com/crim Edited by microsnout on 01 October 2011 at 3:36am 10 persons have voted this message useful | |
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5013 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 6 01 October 2011 at 4:56am | IP Logged |
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Thanks, Microsnout! - I've bookmarked it for future listening.
Best wishes with your immersion progamme; hope you'll have some time to post about it. - If so, I look forward to reading your reports. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| edwin Triglot Senior Member Canada towerofconfusi&Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6268 days ago 160 posts - 183 votes 9 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French, Spanish, Portuguese | Message 3 of 6 19 April 2012 at 6:58pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you, Microsnout! Great resource! Only that the news are a bit too old.
I just went through the 1st speaker (34 recordings). Here are some minor typos I found in your transcription: maghrébènes -> maghrébines maintentant -> maintenant raz-le-bol -> ras-le-bol agro-alimentaire -> agroalimentaire I like this speaker. He is slow and clear. Which radio channel was this? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5275 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 4 of 6 19 April 2012 at 8:28pm | IP Logged |
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These are not from a radio channel at all, it was a database of audio samples that I downloaded from the web site of
a Montreal company that does research in computer voice recognition. This was a test suite for software that automatically generates sub-titles in realtime (I think). The speakers could be employees of the company or just people hired to read this, either way they are not professional news readers which is good. The transcriptions came with the files so they are not mine. I am curious about how you managed to listen to all 34 of the first speaker since the program plays all speakers in a random sequence. And yes the news is a bit dated, lots of stuff about the Iraq war. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| edwin Triglot Senior Member Canada towerofconfusi&Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6268 days ago 160 posts - 183 votes 9 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French, Spanish, Portuguese | Message 5 of 6 20 April 2012 at 3:18pm | IP Logged |
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I see. No wonder every word is so clear!
I find randomly listening to the clips useful only if I understand what they are saying. This means I have to first listen to each clip a few times. So I had to download them. Hope you don't mind. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5275 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 6 of 6 20 April 2012 at 4:52pm | IP Logged |
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No problem, you can do whatever you want with them. You can also set the repeat option to loop them
continuously until you click 'next'. I think I did listen to them one speaker at a time at first, then I loaded them all into my ipod and used 'shuffle' to play them at random. The original files I downloaded were video files of head an shoulder shots of each speaker but I threw out the video to make them smaller. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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