Audio software to help dialog study?

[felipe]

Hello everyone,

I have been studying the audio CD dialogs from the Chinese Made Easier book, and I find that is very helpful to record my own voice while listening to the dialog, and then I replay my recording to compare with the book CD's dialog. However, this process it pretty labor-intensive, because I need to play a sentence, pause it, record my voice, then pause it, then play it again, and so on...

I was wondering if anyone knows a software that would help me with this review?

Thank you,

Felipe

[roddy]

Not sure exactly what you're hoping to do, but have you looked at Audacity? It's free, and lets you select and loop different bits of audio very easily. If I remember correctly what I used to do was play audio in via the earphones, shadow it to the laptop mike and then . . . actually I can't remember exactly what I did, but it was useful.

[thekhanon]

I 2nd roddy's suggestion. I use Audacity to assist me in my Chinese learning to make sure I'm getting my tones right (or at least close).

[mfgillia]

I never really understood how Chinese students could use recordings to evaluate their own tones and pronunciation to determine if it was correct and then make corrections accordingly. I guess if one doesn't have access to native speakers then its better than nothing but tend to think most people would be better off spending money on a tutor.

Spending 3 to 6 months in the beginning working one on one with a decent Mandarin native teacher on tones and pronunciation will most likely save one lots of trouble in the long run.

[renzhe]

Spending 3 to 6 months in the beginning working one on one with a decent Mandarin native teacher on tones and pronunciation will most likely save one lots of trouble in the long run.

True!

But don't underestimate the value of trying to match a native speaker exactly -- it will do wonders to your pronunciation, long after most tutors stop correcting you. You will HEAR the difference clearly, it's a different way to learn.

[imron]

I never really understood how Chinese students could use recordings to evaluate their own tones and pronunciation to determine if it was correct and then make corrections accordingly.

At a minimum you need to be familiar with the tones and be able to hear them correctly.

When you record your own voice, you hear in minute detail all the mistakes, all the pausing, the hesitation, the umming and ahhing and so on. With solid evidence of how crap you sound you can then iteratively try to correct all the smaller mistakes. See here for a longer post of mine detailing how recording your voice can help.

I also agree with spending time at the beginning working on pronunciation with a native speaker.

[c_redman]

I haven't tried recording my speech, but chorusing has worked well for me. Basically, I loop a short to medium sized sentence, let it play a few times by itself, and then jump in and try to match the speed and tone exactly. I'm terrible at first, but gradually I improve to the point where I can't hear 2 separate voices. Not only does it improve my accent, but it also gets me used to the idea of speaking at normal speed. It doesn't magically make me fluent, but the muscle memory of mouth movements does help.

Audacity works well for this, but another free program I like is Transcriber. It's designed for creating transcripts, but you can skip the typing and just use it to create sentence breaks in a longer audio file. You can then navigate from sentence to sentence easier than you can with Audacity.

[imron]

Not only does it improve my accent, but it also gets me used to the idea of speaking at normal speed. It doesn't magically make me fluent, but the muscle memory of mouth movements does help.

Agree completely. It really helps speaking ability to build up speaking at normal speed with the correct pausing and intonation. I've found that once the muscle memory starts to kick in, that helps overall fluency when wanting to speak your own sentences rather than copying native speakers.

[mfgillia]

I really think native speakers are in a much better position to correct someone's pronunciation and tones than the student themselves. A skilled teacher can tell what sounds natural, visually show you how to mimic the sound and is in a much better position to be the final authority of what can be clearly understood.

Not to say that its not useful to listen intently to real native speakers and then to emulate them to the best of one's ability. Of course it is incredibly useful. Just that spending time literally matching up one's sound wave pattern to a native speakers is probably not the greatest utilization of time.

Technology is great but in this instance it probably shouldn't supersede the feedback and correction that native speakers can give - whom generally have a much better idea of what is acceptable than a basic level student studying their own sound diagrams. You may find that something sounds quite pleasant while a native speaker can't understand your version of it at all. Conversely, what may sound rough to you (for example certain low third tones by males) sounds 100% natural to them. The final authority shouldn't be your eyes or relatively primitive listening skills but the ears of a fluent, ideally native, Mandarin speaker.

[imron]

Well, all I know is that it helped me greatly, and there would have been not much use for a tutor sitting alongside me while I was doing all the boring repetitive drills required to build up muscle memory. Having a native speaker on hand wouldn't have made that process go any faster.

I've never studied sound diagrams however. Just listened back to what I recorded.

[renzhe]

A skilled teacher can tell what sounds natural, visually show you how to mimic the sound and is in a much better position to be the final authority of what can be clearly understood.

Chances are that you will manage to get 1000 hours of listening and chorusing study on your own before you even find a teacher of this calibre.

With most native speakers, they will correct the obvious garbage, but when your accents starts getting "good", you will get useful feedback like "it's correct, but somehow, it somehow does not quite sound quite right, say it again... no, somehow, I mean, almost, like somehow".

Perhaps we are talking about different stages of learning here. I find that the extreme listening and repeating ad nauseaum with a recorder is more useful once you get out of the baby stages, and know your q from your ch and your x doesn't sound like a snake hissing. If you haven't got the pinyin and tones down, it's best to go through the pinyin chart with a native speaker and follow their pronunciation closely.

BTW, this is how native speakers practice reading skills too (not always using a computer, but mimicking a good example).

[mfgillia]

Chances are that you will manage to get 1000 hours of listening and chorusing study on your own before you even find a teacher of this calibre.

Nope - he wasn't that hard to find. Teaches professionally at National Taiwan University and quite skilled at teaching and correcting pronunciation and tones. Probably much better than the average professional tutor but have a few friends that also had good experiences with their teachers. At this point, I have had several tutors through the years but that first one definitely made a huge impact and finally got me on the right track after going down more than a few wrong paths.

I find that the extreme listening and repeating ad nauseaum with a recorder is more useful once you get out of the baby

I would think it would be the opposite. Well actually, I don't see much use in it at any level (i.e., extreme listening to my own voice) unless one is studying abroad and making due with limited Mandarin resources. Again, extreme listening to native speakers I certainly understand and highly recommend.

In my particular situation I found I was spending too much time doing passive listening and once focused on active listening my conversational ability really started picking up. Regardless, not sure why someone at a true intermediate level and beyond would keep recording themselves over and over again but if it helps in your particular situation then that's great.

there would have been not much use for a tutor sitting alongside me while I was doing all the boring repetitive drills required to build up muscle memory.

I definitely agree that in the early stages, first two years or so, that practicing really good pronunciation and tones by oneself can be very helpful - especially as you described to get to the point where one can more effortlessly, physically speak while freeing up the brain to focus on more important things - i.e., what one actually wants to say. However, recording myself over and over again and then trying to use that to make meaningful corrections I see somewhat less value in but again if its helps you then that's great.

[renzhe]

mfgillia, have you read through this thread?

It will give you some very good background on why people record themselves. You'll notice that people who practice reading outloud (and actively listen to their own recordings) have the best accent of the lot. The reason why this is important at advanced stages is that pronouncing a single character correctly is really really easy, but sounding native-like when speaking complex sentences, with proper phrasing, pauses at correct places, tone sandhi, sentence prosody, etc. is very very very difficult. That's why most of us can pronounce the pinyin chart like champs, but sound like foreign n00bs when asked to read a newspaper article.

Just practicing that short text and recording it 10 times, listening for errors, has helped me improve my pronunciation significantly. Other people do this more often and it shows.

If you don't record yourself, you do not know how bad you sound.

[mfgillia]

Yep, I have seen that thread before and always assumed it was suppose to help basic level speakers studying abroad without access to native Mandarin speakers. I never imagine people believe that this sort of exercise is on par or superior to feedback from real native speakers.

I really don't think a bunch of foreigners exchanging audio tapes with each other is the optimal way to obtain a high level of proficiency in spoken, conversational Mandarin. One skill is reading static text from a newspaper and imitating a randomly chosen native speaker in such a way that it sounds pleasing to foreigners, which usually for some reason seems to imply sounding like an emotionless newscaster from Beijing.

Another much more valuable skill is to speak, proper conversational Mandarin spontaneously, i.e., both thinking and speaking simultaneously, in a way that sounds clear and natural to native speakers. How one can expect to reach that goal by minimizing the role of native speakers from that equation I have no idea.

I also can't imagine anyone advocating Chinese learn English this way. That is, deciding among themselves by exchanging audio recordings what sounds best and proper without relying much more heavily on the direct feedback from fluent speakers.

[imron]

The problem is, once you get to an acceptable level of Chinese, most native speakers will stop correcting you - especially so the more familiar they are with your speech patterns.

Even if you continually bug your friends to say you want them to always correct your mistakes, it tends to break the general flow of conversation and so corrections are not always forthcoming. Now while I would love to think this is because my Chinese is just so good that it doesn't need corrections, all I need to do is record myself to realise this is not the case.

And it's not just about recording yourself reading newspaper articles either. When speaking with Chinese friends over Skype or whatever, I'll often just hit record and then when the conversation is over, go back and listen to it to see if I can spot any recurring problems. What I'll find is that what seemed at the time to me to be fluent conversation, turns out to be full of all sorts of problems, and going back and working on fixing those problems is what can really help take your Chinese up a notch.

Like renzhe said, if you don't record yourself, you have no way of knowing how bad you are.

Out of curiosity, have you ever tried recording yourself?

[mfgillia]

Did try recording a few times a long time ago. It was fun at the time but didn't do much for me.

I haven't really found it that hard to find critical native Mandarin speakers to critique my pronunciation and tones in Taipei. For the first few years I relied heavily on 1 on 1 tutoring sessions with professional certified teachers, which are generally never quite shy in pointing out these errors. Unlike others on this thread, I also seemed to be blessed with having native Mandarin speaking friends that relish in pointing out mistakes - most likely payback for me ruthlessly heckling their English mistakes.

I did notice in the beginning that whenever I would start working with a new tutor, he/she would generally point out something that the other one didn't or stopped correcting. Luckily that phase seems to be largely over and didn't have these issues with the last 2 or 3 tutors.

I also noticed in the past that different tutors would be more sensitive to different mistakes. The most sensitive tended to be those that didn't speak any English and therefore provided the best feedback in terms of pronunciation and tones.

[felipe]

This is a very interesting discussion, and c_redman: Thank you very much for your tip about the Transcriber software. It solves another problem I was having, which was seeking sentences on CME audio. The audio has one track per chapter, so it's kind of a pain to replay sections like specific vocabulary words and dialog sentences. Transcriber makes this process trivial.

[renzhe]

The problem is, once you get to an acceptable level of Chinese, most native speakers will stop correcting you - especially so the more familiar they are with your speech patterns.

This completely mirrors my own experiences. I don't remember the last time somebody corrected my pronunciation -- choice of words, or grammar, sometimes, but never detailed tone or prosody corrections. Although I know that I make lots of mistakes.

I'd say: use whatever works for you. I personally was very impressed with the pronunciation of imron and heifeng, who both do lots of reading outloud and recording. I thought "that's good, but I can do better", and it was only after I listened to my recording that I noticed how wrong I was. The gap between what I thought I sounded like and what I actually sounded like was frightening. When I tried doing what imron suggested, I noticed a huge improvement. It's not about listening to yourself over and over, it's about comparing your current pronunciation to that of a good standard, and it can be very useful. You hear so many mistakes that you simply do not notice when you speak.