Building new language lab software - input requested

[LaoZhang]

Hi everyone,

First of all, this seems to be a great forum. I just found you guys today and you have quite a community. Kudos to the creators and all of the active members!

I'm in the process of designing a program that will "hopefully" meet the audio-oral needs of learners. The program is not going to explicitly teach grammar or vocabulary, rather will focus on speaking and listening.

My intent is to create program that could potentially replace what's in University language labs, or at least function as a tool for people to use to help them improve primarily their speaking.

I'd like to get some feedback from everyone:

• What features would you like to see?
  
• What features do you like in other programs?
  
• What do you feel is missing?
  

Looking forward to your replies.

谢谢你们!

老张 - LaoZhang

[imron]

You might be interested in some of the discussion in this thread.

[Radial]

I was just looking for this type of software. Does anything exist now? I trying to figure out whether I can listen and record on my audacity software. Not an ideal approach but possible.

[LaoZhang]

I haven't found anything that works in the way I want to. I'm designing it now and am looking for some programmers to help with this project.

What exactly are you looking for?

I want this to be a useful tool for everyone (who wants to work on speaking).

[roddy]

I trying to figure out whether I can listen and record on my audacity software. Not an ideal approach but possible.

You can - there's some info on here if you search 'audacity'. I use it fairly often.

As the OP, I've never used language lab software so I'm not sure what you're looking at doing. How do you envision this working?

[simonlaing]

I must say I have to poo poo this a bit . As the first software I got only had pinyin (without intonation marks at that!) and was quite limited, also if you don't learn character learning strategies early when you start learning characters they can really throw you and make you.

I think the software messed with my chinese learning a bit. If I had had the characters at least under the words I would have realized how much more there is to the language.

Just be careful of billing it as a "comprehensive chinese" without the reading or writing parts to it.

There are english learning software that has voice recognition software and then dialogue integrated with them. You may want to look at them for comparison.

have fun,

Simon:)

[LaoZhang]

okay, let's go to dreamland.

this software will be a comprehensive speaking tool and to some degree, a listening tool as well (though listening comprehension is not the focus). it of course should be used in conjunction with other learning methods, as nothing in and of itself is complete. it will be designed for you to use when you don't have the full attention of someone who is able to critically listen to you and give you constructive help.

it will focus mostly on words and short(er) phrases and will help you hear your own mistakes.

Basically,

1. Open the program
   
2. Plug in your mic/headset
   
3. Open [predefined, random, user created] word/phrase list
   
4. Press PLAY to hear the native voice
   
5. Press RECORD to hear yourself
   
6. Press COMBINED to hear yourself on top of the native speaker.
   

And there are a lot of other features that will really make this useful, for example:

• ability to control playback speed (w/pitch correction) of the native speaker. ideally use low compression to reduce sound quality loss when played at slower speeds
  
• ability to loop sounds (yours and native)
  
• abillity to independently control the volume of the native and your recording
  
• male/female northern/southern 口音
  
• help with common mistakes in pronunciation
  
• exercises on intonation, rhythm
  
• tongue twisters
  
• USEFUL diagrams, videos/diagrams on mouth, tongue, lip position
  

There are some of my initial ideas. If anyone out there thinks this would be useful and has the technical know-how, let's do it!

[roddy]

Audacity will do most of that, though obviously you need to supply your own native-speaker models and you need to do a lot of the set-up manually. A version that would let you 'import' a word list to work through one by one would be nice, though if you are actually going to do this I'd recommend focusing first on a solid pinyin foundation - starting with the intials / finals, putting them together, bringing in tones, tone changes, tone patterns.

[LaoZhang]

Thanks Roddy.

Yeah, we can piecemeal these features together or try to figure out how to mold existing services., but I think most users don't want to go through the trouble--I'd rather not. I want to make a nice, portable package. And this will have cross-language capabilities as well. Once the framework is done, it'll be easy to essentially drop in any language. I want to make something easy. I have a lot of friends studying different languages and they "quit" using certain books, study guides, electronic dictionaries, software because it's not intuitive enough. Studying Chinese is hard enough. I don't want technology to add to the complication.

[roddy]

I can see how a bit of desktop software with Audacity-like functionality but more automated, that you could drop xml-type files into to give you an instant pronunciation lesson would be pretty useful.

[geek_frappa]

I'm in the process of designing a program that will "hopefully" meet the audio-oral needs of learners. The program is not going to explicitly teach grammar or vocabulary, rather will focus on speaking and listening.

I can see how a bit of desktop software with Audacity-like functionality but more automated, that you could drop xml-type files into to give you an instant pronunciation lesson would be pretty useful.

I created a pinyin inventory using only Audacity.

A native speaker read each morpheme 5 times, then I post-processed the sound files into smaller files using Nyquist, C++ and Lisp

EDIT: Sorry, I accidentally pressed 'Submit Post'. I wanted to add that you can create software for helping researchers with rescue languages, so having a profile marker would be a very nice feature. Good luck with this cool project.

[LaoZhang]

Yes, rescuing (dying/fading)languages is another great application for this project.

What is a profile marker?

Thanks for sharing your inventory. That is very useful.

[geek_frappa]

What is a profile marker?

a profile marker is an attribute (primary key, or unique id) connecting a sound with the speaker. this allows multiple users to record in a distributed computing environment.

[Radial]

I have identified two software that seems to be working in this arena.

The first is DLRecorder which is offered for free... I downloaded it and it is easy to use... just drop in a recording and you can record over... it would be nice to set it so that after each sentence you had a space to repeat what had been said... it is designed to be used in a teacher/student relationship where the program will send back the results to the teachter. There will be some updates some (so they say.)

http://schiller.dartmouth.edu/dl-recorder/

and the second is FollowMe. I downloaded a piece... and it then wanted to download a larger piece... and my antivirus blocks it from being download. I must admit that their website does not overly impress... but the idea is right.

http://www.tarsoft.com/followme.htm

[Comenius]

Dear Laozhang,

I work in the Language Lab market and I am sure that you are aware that products from Sanako, Robotel, Artec etc will do all that you could possibly want but if you are looking for a software only product that greatly enhance the teaching of Chinese then you would be best to look at LogoLAB by Logosapience.

MAJOR FEATURES AND BENEFITS

1. Allows audio, video, image and text based assignments to be created and accessed from any network point in the school.

2. Full set of voice recording and Audio- visual playback facilities supplied.

3. Creates individual student workspaces for personalised learning and self study.

4. Students able to practice Speaking and Listening skills via home PCs.

5. Most standard file types supported including DOC, AVI, WAV and MP3.

6. Capable of being used in a non ICT environment through the use of a laptop, projector and whiteboard.

7. Allows teachers to enhance and test reading writing, speaking and listening skills for any language.

8. Monitoring of completed tasks available through assessment tools.

9. Mentoring of students working outside a classroom environment possible through an inbuilt messaging system.

10. Subtitling and segmentation tools available for teachers to support students for whom English is not their first language.

11. All language keysets such as Mandarin,Urdu, Bengali, and Arabic supported through Unicode.

12. Wireless networking and roving laptop use enabled.

13. Cross curricular use in the delivery of audio, video, image or text files.

14. Enhances Best Practice through creating a shared multimedia library which can be organised into subjects, year groups etc

15. No additional hardware requirements

16. No additional cabling needs

17. Full remote and on site support options available

18. Allows the easy creation of stimulating and exciting language lesson resources, accessible for remedial teaching, revision, self study and classroom based learning.