A cool way to use the audio

kencarroll
May 16, 2007, 06:06 AM posted in General Discussion

Here's something that I like to do with the audio: I listen to full the dialogs from the podcast one sentence at a time. I stop after each one and compare them with those same sentences then in the Dialog section. The difference between the two is interesting. They're the same sentences but there's a world of difference in how they are presented. I find this informative. 

 The podcast dialogs have  an element of drama and work as a whole. There are usually 2 actors whose job it is to make the thing sound as natural as possible and give it that context. By contrast, the sentences in the 'Dialog' section are  disembodied and deliberately taken out of context in order to allow you to  focus on the sounds. Invariably the voices are different and there is no attempt to 'act' with these.

By comparing the two I think you can learn a lot about natural speech, intonation, stress, emphasis, and a whole lot more. I think this is a hugely useful way to learn because it engages several 'higher order' cognitive functions: you have to infer, to judge, and to make decisions, for example. All this leads to deeper learning.

I'd like to hear from the Big Brain on this.

 

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brendan
May 16, 2007, 02:18 PM

I do something similar. After listening to the full dialog a few times, I listen to it sentence by sentence under the dialog tab. This is mostly in an attempt to divide and conquer, rather than listening for two different renderings (though in pronunciation I do find them very different - much softer endings on many words for example). The ease of pushing play over and over on one sentence brings me closer to a very effective mode of listening which I've tried to describe here. When I've understood everything that I'm going to by just listening, then I look at the hanzi and take it from there. This beats the hell out of my pre-premium subscriber days of listening to the whole dialog and then reading the PDF (trying to shield my eyes from the English).