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The Problems with Listening-Reading L-R | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Toriyama Newbie United States Joined 5524 days ago 12 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 9 of 64 21 July 2013 at 9:16pm | IP Logged |
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umiak,
The software is a platform that runs in the web browser and on mobile devices. All of the texts and audio are provided for you. You start by selecting a language, book, and chapter. This loads a parallel text of the chapter. As the audio plays the corresponding passage is highlighted. If you want to replay a passage, you simply click on the paragraph and the audio seeks to the correct position and begins playing. I may be able to get a demo online so you can gain a better understanding of how it works. There will be a beta test as soon as we are ready. Sign up for it at the link I provided in my original post. I personally want to have Chinese available on the platform as soon as possible, but it really is up to the team. There are still a lot of experiments to be done with non-phonetic scripts using this method. Suggest any languages or books that you would like to see in the beta test. As a user of this method, your opinion is very important to us. Edit: clarification of the platform Edited by Toriyama on 21 July 2013 at 10:19pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Toriyama Newbie United States Joined 5524 days ago 12 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 11 of 64 21 July 2013 at 9:57pm | IP Logged |
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erenko,
Thank you for the link to an explanation of the method. I updated my original post with the information. You can certainly download the audio to use on your ipod if you wish. The text is formatted using html, so you can download that as well. Your feedback is helpful to our team and very much appreciated. The platform is being built to work in the web browser and on mobile devices. Based on the way the project is going, it should be possible to use the software offline (in a browser or on a mobile device). Of course, you need to be connected to the server initially in order to download the data. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| MarcoDiAngelo Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 6243 days ago 208 posts - 345 votes  Speaks: Serbian*, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Thai, Polish | Message 12 of 64 21 July 2013 at 11:56pm | IP Logged |
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Toriyama & HTLAL community,
It's been a while since I posted anything on the forum, although I've been lurking on and off without logging in just to stay in touch with the newest trends. If you hadn't sent me the PM, I wouldn't have seen this thread. I've been contacted by a few other brilliant people who were trying to start some interesting and useful projects, asking me to give them my input or help. If due to my ever decreasing leisure time I have neglected any of you - please receive my sincere apologies. In the meantime, I have used my precious little free time to actually learn as much as I could about languages and to study a few of them intensively. My L-R experience with Spanish (my first Romance language) was that of enjoyment and success, and so was studying Italian and German (which I have only dabbled in). I don't remember having made any parallel texts since the bilingual-texts.com because I had more than enough of them for my needs. Right now I'm interested in languages such as Japanese, Chinese and Greek (which is very problematic, because there are virtually no audio books available). I will most definitely try out your website and I'm looking forward to it. Many similar projects have failed, but their legacy remains. I hope yours will be much more successful and I would be interested to participate (as much as my terrible schedule allows me to). Best, Marco 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6235 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 64 22 July 2013 at 12:36am | IP Logged |
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A fair amount of information about the method, in aYa's own words, can be found at
http://learnlangs.com/Listening-Reading_important_passages.h tm. It'll be interesting to see where this project goes. I personally hate doing user-interface work, but have had a few ideas over the years - feel free to run with them, try them, or ignore them. None of them are crucial, but some could potentially be handy. Behind the scenes, paragraph (or even word or sentence) audio and text alignment could be quite useful. What I envision that enabling is: a) Being able to click on something to hear it, b) being able to see where you are at any given time (by making the background behind the text being spoken yellow, for instance), and c) being able to search for structures or words and automatically extract the audio of the text containing them. Absolutely none of these things are essential for L-R, but the first can be an occasionally be nice, the second can make the first few hours less painful, and I've often dreamed of the third. The third is absolutely not essential, but being able to extract words and phrases to repeat them (or even put them onto your mp3 player or anki, etc, depending on your tastes) is useful, and it's fairly tedious to do at the moment - it's a matter of opening a sound editor, finding the right place, manually extracting the right chunk, etc. If you do implement b), being able to see where you are, please make it very easy to turn off. I definitely don't consider it necessary; both Russian and Chinese (with no pinyin) only took perhaps 3-4 hours until finding my place wasn't a huge deal, but for those 3-4 hours, it would have been appreciated. I've seen various small texts and apps that have this kind of highlighting; it can be good. But this really is an optimization for the first handful of hours, and perhaps the first few minutes of your sessions on the 2nd and maybe 3rd day, at least in my experience. And the way aYa's generally recommended getting around it is an interlinear text, plus an extra column in a familiar script; the above URL has a couple of brief examples, where a few paragraphs illustrate the point. The main problem is much less a technical one than one of materials. Parallel texts are easily available, audiobooks are often easily available, but having a matching parallel text for a particular audiobook can be surprisingly time-consuming. Quality is also paramount: many translations are bad or abridged, and many audiobooks are not read particularly well; this is true of both commercial and free amateur ones. You can spot a poor translation fairly quickly, and an abridged one even more quickly, but it's worth checking that you find the story high enough quality to LR and that the audiobook is well-read by a native speaker before you invest much time in making it; I've lost weeks to making parallel texts and then realizing this isn't the case. You also need to be careful about copyright and licenses: between licenses that prohibit commercial use, licenses that prohibit modification, unclear copyright status of originals, translations, and particular editions of everything, etc, it can be quite time-consuming, and may involve negotiations with 3rd parties. And verify: it's not uncommon to find derived works (like translations, audiobooks, and parallel texts) under licenses that they don't actually have the right to be under, either at all or in anywhere but a couple of countries (copyright terms are shorter in Australia, Iran doesn't have bilateral agreements with the rest of the world, etc). If your goal is to maximize utility to learners, also make sure you read What I do before I start L-R - it's part of the above link, by aYa. It's probably worth having a pointer or two to good pronunciation courses, and some minimalistic grammar notes for features a learner may not have encountered before ("This language uses cases, they look like this" accompanied by a sample table with audio for each phrase, with an interlinear gloss - a page or two on features people won't expect goes a long way). While I barely use pop-up dictionaries, aYa swears by them - and they are definitely useful for things like idiomatic expressions which contain unusual words; consider building one into your site. I'll quote the above document again: "NOTHING SHOULD EVER BE DONE AT THE EXPENSE OF EXPOSURE until you get to natural listening to difficult texts." It's easy to spend time optimizing various useful side-tools, but your goal presumably isn't to make yet another mediocre grammar course. High-quality parallel texts with audio really are the key component, and most add-ons are at best minor bonuses, and at worst absolutely distracting. If they're public domain or under a creative-commons license that allows derivation, they'll also be significantly more useful to end users. I'm always happy to see more sources of high-quality LR material; I hope you become one. Good luck. Edit: I've fixed the second link. Thanks jeff_lindqvist. It's almost the link you suggested, but I've observed that the sites sometimes have different versions; at the moment, they're the same. Edit2: While it won't help your project directly, I think a decent book for step 2 (reading L2/Listening L2, before moving onto LR itself) for Mandarin is "The Besieged City". It has recordings, and interlinear pinyin/characters, but no translations aside from a few side notes. Edited by Volte on 22 July 2013 at 1:37pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6705 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 64 22 July 2013 at 1:42am | IP Logged |
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The above link didn't work, but I suppose this was what Volte had in mind:
What I do before I start L-R 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5661 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 15 of 64 24 July 2013 at 9:37pm | IP Logged |
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Wow, i'd love to help with this. I've signed up for notifications. Personally, i'd love to see some LR resources for Catalan and Galician.
Will the texts all be TL->English? 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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