Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

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vinnie
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Re: Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

Postby vinnie » Tue May 01, 2018 9:10 pm

You intrigued me and I wanted to try subs2srs, but unfortunately it seems to work only on windows.
I looked for something like this and I found this https://github.com/kelciour/movies2anki
It has few dependencies (just python, ffmpeg and pyqt4). The way it works is a bit strange, but following the instructions I can make it work.

I tried downloading agent327 and its subtitles from youtube, but I do not know, I did not find it very practical, perhaps trying with a real film.
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Re: Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

Postby rdearman » Tue May 01, 2018 9:43 pm

vinnie wrote:You intrigued me and I wanted to try subs2srs, but unfortunately it seems to work only on windows.
I looked for something like this and I found this https://github.com/kelciour/movies2anki
It has few dependencies (just python, ffmpeg and pyqt4). The way it works is a bit strange, but following the instructions I can make it work.

I tried downloading agent327 and its subtitles from youtube, but I do not know, I did not find it very practical, perhaps trying with a real film.

Substudy works on mac and linux and windows.
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Re: Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

Postby vinnie » Tue May 01, 2018 10:56 pm

ok, I saw it but you have encouraged me to try it.

differences with movies2anki:
- the main one is that audio files are created instead a video
- the audio files have been "cut better", that is, many more shorter files have been created
- playback is started only when you click on show the answer as well the subtitles (I do not know if it's better but I think it was done to make listening easier)
- the instructions to create the template (linked by subs2srs) are written too summarily, I managed to configure it the first time but I used a lot of instinct (I understand why I need to import the sample file into movies2anki)

Pro:
- less space occupied, shorter segments
- less dependencies (maybe just ffmpeg?)
- more possibilities (like combine 2 language sub in one)
- more unix style

Cons:
- you must know how to use the shell
- it's not hard to use (at least basically) but the instructions are bad (I put the images/audio in collection.media as explained by the movie2anki page, I did not find this explanation on the substudy user documentation, moreover the API doc page is broken)
- probably in anki for playback is always used mplayer, the side effect is that you can slow down a video in real time (with [] and {}) but not the audio (because there is no focus on playback)



probably the solution of tommus is more agile, but I have not found alternative for linux and nor opensource
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Re: Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

Postby Random Review » Wed May 02, 2018 2:21 am

tommus wrote:For me, there is a very important issue to improve listening by reading along with subtitles or transcripts:

The text has to match the audio very accurately!

Then use WorkAudioBook

I find that far too many subtitles are too inaccurate to read while listening. Your mind spends almost all its effort on trying to create some match between the audio and the text. To be effective, the text has to match the audio very accurately! Otherwise, neither the audio or the text is been understood correctly and effectively. So find matching text.

I have to force myself to not spend all my time messing around with editing audio and text to try and make great study material. Here is my most effective technique:

1. Get audio and text that match.

2. Play the audio with WorkAudioBook while reading the text from a plain text file. Don't waste time putting the text itself into WorkAudioBook. Don't waste time meticulously matching the audio chunks with complete phrases or sentences. Just let WorkAudioBook do its own segmenting of the audio. It won't be exact but that is not a big issue. OK, for some important phrases, you can quickly highlight the correct audio chunk.

Free WorkAudioBook

3. Click "Play Selection" over and over again while reading that segment in the text. Repeat as many times as necessary. When you are satisfied with that chunk of audio:

4. Click "Play Next", then go back to Step 3 (Click "Play Selection" over and over ...)

5. Keep going as long as you want. Record it if you wish.

The key points are:

1. It is very easy.

2. It doesn't waste time.

3. It is just as good as if you spent hours cutting, pasting, aligning, putting in Anki, etc., etc.

Keep it simple and almost all of your time will be spent improving your listening.


Sorry to be a pain, but Workaudiobook looks really interesting. How can I download this without accessing Google Play (I'm in China and it's blocked).
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Re: Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

Postby vinnie » Wed May 02, 2018 12:31 pm

Random Review wrote:Sorry to be a pain, but Workaudiobook looks really interesting. How can I download this without accessing Google Play (I'm in China and it's blocked).


If the block is on ip I think the hashimi solution is better, otherwise you could try this: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github ... yalpstore/
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Re: Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

Postby Sayquoi » Wed May 02, 2018 11:22 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUBuIJuKptw

Something that helped me a lot was this video, at least for French. Him explaining pronunciation patterns allowed me to better understand why I was having such a hard time. For example, instead of saying je suis, many French people would just say something like "shwee". "Ee" instead of il, "skoo" instead of ce que and so on. I'm Scottish so I'm well aware of the importance of understanding badly pronounced language! I'd recommend anyone to watch at least some of the video, even if you're not studying French. He has some interesting insights.
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Re: Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

Postby Uncle Roger » Thu May 03, 2018 7:30 am

Sayquoi wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUBuIJuKptw



That's quite the challenge I am having with my Norwegian. It's not the big fancy words that trip you, it's the small stuff the speaker just glides over quickly and badly.

I'm Scottish so I'm well aware of the importance of understanding badly pronounced language!


Ahaha, bless you, you guys surely gave me a hard time when I moved to the UK :D
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Re: Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

Postby Carmody » Sun May 13, 2018 9:38 pm

Uncle Roger in his Feb.8 posting:
Listening is the hardest thing. It's the thing that doesn't allow you to speak to natives because you don't get enough of their side of the conversation even when your half sounds believable and advanced. In my opinion, it's not your accent or your grammar that hold you back. It's the fact that in order to understand them, you'd have to ask them to repeat themselves more slowly, more clearly and with words you are absolutely familiar with. And that you'd have to ask this off them so often that they'd lose it.
The natives can understand you despite your accent and imperfect grammar.
But you/we are continuously stunned by their speed, their vocabulary and the little details unique to many of them
Many thanks for sharing the information. Most grateful.
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Re: Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

Postby Uncle Roger » Mon May 14, 2018 8:02 am

You are welcome. Could be perception, could be "personal styles" and all that.
But if you are overwhelmed by the memorisation side of things (which is understandable coming from English, with no genders, no matching adjectives, much fewer verb tenses, verbs hardly changing for the person etc), spaced repetition could be of great help.
And if you feel frustrated by speech vs text, then Subs2SRS can help a lot as well.

Just give them a solid try. Happy to help via PM. Don't just sit and ponder, inaction is one of the great sins of language learning.
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Re: Improving your listening: state of the art approaches?

Postby Sayonaroo » Sun May 20, 2018 1:42 am

Kraut wrote:
Sayonaroo wrote:that program sounds cool. I'll have to see if it's more efficient than using kmplayer. it seems like it but i have to actually try using it to know for sure.

kmplayer has a AB repeat function so what you do is load the audio and press f5 to set point and f6 to point b. at that point it repeats point a to point b endlessly until you press f8 to turn the loop off. f8 is used to turn the ab repeat on and off. while you have the ab repeat off you can see a new point a and point b.

EDIT: I love that program. it's super efficient and i love how you can make it repeat the section.


VLC Player also has the AB repeat function, which I find more comfortable: here the mouse alone does the job:

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... GFOQea3_6M:


thanks for sharing but I still find kmplayer easier because I changed the setting so I rewind/fastforward the video by scrolling the mouse and I find it much easier to press a key then to press something on the cmputer screen using the mouse. I use kmplayer for video files and the workaudiobook for audio files. Also the imllayer is more customizable like the subtitle display/font settings.
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