solution to dillema

RCK
 November 03, 2010, 04:47 AM posted in General Discussion

Have you ever been doing whatever and you feel like chilling out and listening to music but you know you should listen to chinese dialogues to gain further exposure and really drill home those new words until you are sick to death?

I downloaded audacity and spliced together a ton of cpod dialogues, increased the speed 20% (might as well be more efficient with my time) and mixed a bunch of trance music in, increased the volume on my cpod dialogues and slightly decreased the music volume (get your priorities straight).  Exported it to mp3 and loaded it on my ipod, and I gotta say it is pretty sick.

I can chill out and listen to music while taking a walk without wasting chinese language learning time.  At the gym I can get the workout pump from my music without sacrificing all that time to improve my chinese. 

I know it is such a simple thing but darn it feels revolutionary!  Ya'll should try (hick accent implied)

RCK

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pretzellogic
 November 03, 2010, 11:15 AM

Sick? Yeah, actually it does sound cool and creative. I'll buy it.  How effective is it? Do you know the cpod dialogues in half the time? Are you able to retain the dialogues for longer?

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RCK
 November 03, 2010, 12:16 PM

It aint for sale, you just gotta make it yourself.  Basically I find it to be the most effective training/study method I have ever used.  

I am getting to the point where going through all of these lessons is soooo time consuming that I need to start editing out each lessons and just slimming everything down to meatier chunks that I want to listen to over and over.

But seriously, take a handful of lessons and listen to them over and over like 100 times, you will be amazed at how you can just spit out lines you hear from the audio b/c they just play through your mind.

I used Audacity to mix/splice everything up...you can download it for free...just google it.  I'm noticing there are sections that I need to really speed up and sections I need to slow down, and somethings I just leave at normal speed.

 

Good luck! 

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pretzellogic
 November 03, 2010, 01:05 PM

Fair enough. I think you posted earlier that you were at the elementary level.  I recall elementary dialogues are about 15-45 seconds or so.  you must use a lot of them per song if you only use the dialogue.  I already have Audacity and Transcribe! on this computer, so i'll have to give this a try as well. Thanks for the tip.

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RCK
 November 03, 2010, 01:38 PM

I wouldnt say I am elementary but I am amazed at how helpful it is reviewing the expressions in elementary.  I find reviewing intermediate can be the most helpful, because when I speak it is mostly more intermediate lvl, without the more specialized vocab that comes in at upper int and advanced...