A language learners’ forum

I wish I had time for German radio! Alas, the best part of Tagesshau is that it’s only 15 minutes. If only my commute time were my own, but I drive in with the kids, and it doesn’t seem fair to subject them to Deutschlandfunk. (I do occasionally sneak in the Frozen soundtrack in French. They already had the original memorized, so they don’t complain *too* much. Je voudrais un bonhomme de neige!)

You guys!!! There is a Russian bookstore literally a mile from my house!!! We were driving back from dinner and the Cyrillic in the window caught my eye. Okay, so I’m a long way from Russian books, and native materials were never really going to be an issue, since my library has extensive holdings, but still! A real TL bookstore! The browsing I can someday do!

Today I read the kids a new French picture book that we picked up at Goodwill yesterday. By complete chance, it was an Easter book! (Little girl turns into a fairy when she eats a magic baguette and makes wildly popular dinosaur Easter chocolates for her parents’ boulangerie...) It was a delightful Easter surprise. What are the odds, right?I hope you all had a wonderful Easter, and/or a wonderful day.

The one month Russian Clozemaster check-in: I’ve reviewed 6,578 sentences or 2.8% of the 233,585 sentences in the deck. At this rate it will take me 2.9 years to finish the course.

Actually this seems like a pretty good deal. Russian was always going to be a slog. While I may fly right through the Fluency Fast-Track with French or German, I’ve got to grind, grind, grind with Russian. At least I’m enjoying it.

Read an interesting article about “enhanced” quality TTS for IPhone.

http://blog.vocabninja.com/2015/01/19/t ... he-voices/

Although I’ve grown quite fond of Thomas, Anna and Milena (they have names!!), I’ll be downloading the enhanced voices for my languages tonight.

It’s funny, I find the target language voices quite pleasant, but I think Samantha, the English voice, sounds awful. Perhaps my ear is more finely tuned to English? I’d love to hear what you think about the voices in your native and target languages.

My wifi was wonky so they took forever to download, but the enhanced voices are really impressive. Or should I say, expressive. The voices were already good on stressing the right syllable in a word, but the enhanced voices are better at stressing the right word in a sentence.

The only minor downside is that the new voices are a bit distracting. I think they are approaching the auditory uncanny valley. They sound so almost human my brain pays more attention to them. I’m assuming this will wear off with familiarity.

I’m starting to feel tugged towards Spanish. With my French listening comprehension and my two years of middle school Spanish I’m tempted to jump straight into native materials. Well native newscasts. The news is my favorite linguistic kiddie-pool.

I’ve decided the siren song of Spanish was really my mind asking for a new challenge, not a new language. So I finally started FSI French... Wow. It’s perfect. After a couple hundred hours of French listening, that is. I can’t imagine starting this without any background. They talk so fast! This is going to be fun.

Hi Lawyer and Mom, I’m working through the lower levels of Clozemaster Russian as well (in parallell with Michel Thomas and Pimsleur) and I’m impressed by the high quality text-to-speech voices of the cloze listening exercises. I’m using the Tatyana voice. Is it the same one you’re using? Have you turned off spaced repetition of already seen sentences by the way? I’m considering doing that — with more than two hundred thousand sentences I’ll have the high and mid frequency words repeated enough times anyway.

For all my Clozemaster love, I haven’t actually gone Pro yet. I don’t think you can change your review frequency in the free version. But yeah, I’d be tempted. I’m 5,000 sentences into the 15,000 sentences in the first 500 words, and it’s slow going. I’m still enjoying it, but it’s going to be a long time before I hit 1,500 words and get to start on cartoons.

Clozemaster actually uses different TTS for cloze-listening and cloze-sentences. (I don’t know why.) Cloze-sentences uses the TTS native to my phone, so now the enhanced Milena. I’ll have to try the cloze-listening again to compare the voices. (You get a few a day on the free version.)

Time to plug http://listen.bible.is. I know the Bible isn’t for everyone, but the New Testament is a great learning text. I’ll admit I’ve never read the whole thing, even in English, so you don’t have to be a bible expert to benefit. The language is simple and repetitive, and you are probably at least a little bit familiar with the cast of characters. The dramatic recordings are remarkably good. There are voices! And tasteful music! Everything is clearly spoken. You can listen on the app and follow along with the text, or just download the audio. Either way, it’s completely free.

I’m using the French download. I find it makes the perfect background listening at work. Soothing, not too complicated. Perfect for document review!

My kids have really gotten into Papa Moll lately. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papa_Moll

It’s a Swiss comic strip about family life. (Mom, dad, two kids and a dog. Light-hearted hijinks ensue.). The kids like the short, colorful stories. I like that all of the text is presented in rhyming couplets. Maintaining the rhyming structure is a real gut check on your pronunciation! It also means the word order can be a bit more convoluted. Keeps you on your toes as you translate on the fly!

Well recommended, a super successful Goodwill find.