Resources for shadowing/chorusing

[c_redman]

For repeating sentences, I've found Transcriber a somewhat easier tool to work with than Audacity. It has a sonogram like Audacity, but you can easily put in breaks wherever you need to, at the phrase or sentence level. Single sections can then be highlighted, and set to loop as you practice matching the speech. The correspondence between segment and audio section also makes it easy to move on to the next sentence or to a different portion of the audio.

[Gleaves]

Using anki and smart.fm might be an option - you can use anki to import lessons (with audio) from smart.fm.

Here are two smart.fm lists for learning Chinese. Between them, there are a couple thousand sentences with decent audio. These lessons aren't designed to cover all the sounds of Chinese, necessarily, but by the sheer amount of audio they probably cover a good bit.

http://smart.fm/series/3334

http://smart.fm/series/3325

Once anki is installed, you'll have to download the smart.fm plugin from the file>download menu. I have a deck where the audio is the front of the card and Chinese the back. I often repeat the audio a bunch of times on each card.

[phyrex]

c_redman: Thank you very much, that's a good tip! I am however quite partial to Fission , which has turned out to be perfect for it If you're a mac user and you're reading this, give it a try too ;)

Gleaves: I know and love Anki - I'm 5000 sentences into it already, but my own, not from smartfm . I haven't thought of using their sentences for shadowing though, it's a very good idea. Do they speak at natural speed there?

[Gleaves]

You can have a listen on the smart.fm site (for example here). Mostly normal speed, sometimes a little quick.

[phyrex]

I'd like to answer my own question here:

Somehwere in this forum I found this AWESOME resource: http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/modules/zh-cn-11/dmod/index.html (Thanks, person who has suggested this! Sorry, I forgot the name already )

It's 20 dialogs natural speed colloquial Beijinghua! Just great!

I recorded the dialogs as an mp3, if anybody else would like that.

Just thought I'd share that, in case anybody will ever has the same question as me!