Introducing Skygge, a Shadowing Tool

[Yang Chuanzhang]

Skygge is a project I've been working on over the last month. I got interested in shadowing after reading about it here on the forums and I tried to make the process as painless as possible. My goal was to write a program that would allow me to schedule 15 minutes a day for shadowing practise and actually spend these 20 minutes shadowing, not cutting up long mp3s and fighting Audacity's interface

 

I still have a few ideas for features I want to implement, but it already has a few cool features including:

• a library of sentences (audio, pinyin, Chinese, English) that can be loaded and shadowed from within Skygge
• a slick interface that tries to get out of the way, especially when I using the four hotkeys 

Anyway, Skygge is free and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, so why not give it a try (and give some feedback afterwards ).

 

Download Skygge (scroll down a bit)

 

 

If you are a programmer, you can download the source and fork Skygge here.

[li3wei1]

Nice. How do you go beyond the sentences in the library? If I want to slice up a recording, or I have an audio file from a textbook.

[Yang Chuanzhang]

Thanks Adding custom sentence packs is a feature I'm working on at the moment.

[ChTTay]

Your website wouldn't load for me from within China.

What is shadowing? I haven't seen anything about it on these forums. The search function wasn't yielding anything?!

[querido]

ChTTay: I got 47 hits. Try it again! Change the grey box from "Google" to "Forums".

[imron]

How do you pronounce the name?

[Yang Chuanzhang]

ChTTay: That's surprising, thanks for telling me. Does it load forever or do you get some kind of error message? You could try these direct links to amazon's servers, if you still want to download the app: ( Mac / Windows, Linux ). Shadowing is the process of speaking after a native speaker and possible recording yourself while doing so. In the Glossika thread, there were a few people discussing it.

 

imron: I pronounce it Sk玉gg餓, but I don't know what the correct Danish pronunciation of this word is

[ChTTay]

My bad, it was just google not working (for me, from Beijing) rather than no hits. I thought it had loaded with no hits but i guess it was just hanging!!

Will try to switch as querido suggests!

The first time i tried accessing, it just hung, the second time it hung for a bit but then loaded, the third time it hung for too long for me to wait. Might just be one of those things... Or because you made this post 100000 Chinese forum members are accessing your site!

[ChTTay]

Oh, also... Shadowing just seems like another name for drilling or echoing... Which is what we usually call it when teaching English. Anyway, im sure those shadowing threads get into it.

Your software looks good. Where have you/people been getting their sentences from?

[Yang Chuanzhang]

Right now, you can only load sentences from the sentence library (the icon in the top right), but I'm working on a next version that allows loading custom sentences.

[ChTTay]

Where did you source the sentences from?

[Yang Chuanzhang]

My girlfriend and I made them. I usually turn them into longer mp3s and listen to and repeat after them during my commute.

 

I just added another sentence pack to the library which should appear the next time you start the program.