Re: Fluent Forever Pronunciation Trainers - opinions?
Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2016 8:01 am
OK I know I'm coming to this conversation a bit late ... but I did buy the French version.
What I liked:
1. Interesting to hear similar sounds, pronounced by the same person, side by side - e.g dessous/dessus and rue/roue - and have to distinguish between them. I could probably have found that on Youtube but not the repeated having to choose the right one.
2. I learned a LOT about Anki! which helped me produce some really useful Welsh cards.
What I didn't like:
1. Lots of cards have two audio files - the sound of an individual phoneme and then a word containing that phoneme. Firstly the phonemes are pronounced in an exaggerated way so /z/ is pronounced zzzzzzz and /p/ sounds more like puh!!! (My knowledge of the phonics approach to teaching children to read suggests this is not at all what you should be doing.) More importantly I'm not at all convinced the sound as pronounced in the phoneme recording always matches the sound in the word recording.
2. I'm also not convinced the IPA given under the words always quite matches what is said.
3. Some cards contrast English and French pronunciations - e.g. bank/banc - but as the English is with a US accent it's less helpful to a Brit.
4. There's at least one mistake in that 'orbit' is given the English spelling rather than 'orbite' as per my dictionary.
Overall I'm happy to have purchased it - not least because it proved to be a quick and easy lesson in Anki. Also my French is good enough for the issues listed not to matter much to me. However, the Fluent Forever website suggests that when learning a new language you should start with the sounds before worrying about any meaning and whilst in theory I like that idea a lot, I don't think I'd buy it for a language I didn't know until issues I found with French had been sorted out.
What I liked:
1. Interesting to hear similar sounds, pronounced by the same person, side by side - e.g dessous/dessus and rue/roue - and have to distinguish between them. I could probably have found that on Youtube but not the repeated having to choose the right one.
2. I learned a LOT about Anki! which helped me produce some really useful Welsh cards.
What I didn't like:
1. Lots of cards have two audio files - the sound of an individual phoneme and then a word containing that phoneme. Firstly the phonemes are pronounced in an exaggerated way so /z/ is pronounced zzzzzzz and /p/ sounds more like puh!!! (My knowledge of the phonics approach to teaching children to read suggests this is not at all what you should be doing.) More importantly I'm not at all convinced the sound as pronounced in the phoneme recording always matches the sound in the word recording.
2. I'm also not convinced the IPA given under the words always quite matches what is said.
3. Some cards contrast English and French pronunciations - e.g. bank/banc - but as the English is with a US accent it's less helpful to a Brit.
4. There's at least one mistake in that 'orbit' is given the English spelling rather than 'orbite' as per my dictionary.
Overall I'm happy to have purchased it - not least because it proved to be a quick and easy lesson in Anki. Also my French is good enough for the issues listed not to matter much to me. However, the Fluent Forever website suggests that when learning a new language you should start with the sounds before worrying about any meaning and whilst in theory I like that idea a lot, I don't think I'd buy it for a language I didn't know until issues I found with French had been sorted out.