This has been at the front of my thoughts lately. The thread on pronunciation assessment made me realize I'm lacking with now real plan on improving. So

Before: I always shadowed my Anki sentences. These were iKnow sentences (good) and TTS grammar sentences (better than nothing if speaking like a soulless robot bent on world domination is your thing).

Now: I was able to put together a shadow mp3 with iKnow sentences. This was audio followed with equal amounts of silence. It looks doable as a 30 to 60 minute practice. I'm thinking of doing this in 40 lines or about 3 minute clips.

In addition, I'm thinking of doing similar with the audio clips that subs2srs creates. This seems like a good idea as it can be full on conversation.

That's my plans for shadowing. If I can, I'll post the mp3's I make on the slipvine site.

Any comments or tips or links from others?

Small mention of something I do a lot. You might not want to listen to me though since my pronunciation is not perfect.
I am crazy, and I talk to myself all the time. Whenever I relive memories, I tend to repeat the dialogue from the conversation. If you have a good enough audio memory, this can prove as an informal shadowing method that you can do anywhere.
To find an audio reading of a book, you can search with 朗読 attached to your query. (It is sad my book club idea failed, because we could have split up audiobooks version for flashcards after reading.)

That sounds like a pretty good idea to me. It's amazing what even a small amount of shadowing can do, so I think something like that (minutes of straight shadowing) is bound to bring on tons of progress. My shadowing is just sentences scattered throughout my deck, but even with that I was able to at least improve my pronunciation by double. Let us know how this goes!

http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/...study.html

Thanks for that link Alyks. Walking around sounds good. I remember doing that when doing Pimsleur.

Now, in that video, the man is just saying things. Is that recitation or shadowing? I thought shadowing is repeating what you hear, on the idea you know very quickly what you're getting wrong.

Nukemarine Wrote:Thanks for that link Alyks. Walking around sounds good. I remember doing that when doing Pimsleur.

Now, in that video, the man is just saying things. Is that recitation or shadowing? I thought shadowing is repeating what you hear, on the idea you know very quickly what you're getting wrong.

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...=9492&PN=1

Also:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showpost.p...stcount=12

S2Shadowing.

I've been working on this this week....

get it from here
http://intheshiz.net/post/2009/03/15/S2Shadowing.aspx

image:
http://intheshiz.net/image.axd?picture=2...dowing.png

It will load in the Anki exported tab separated file, load in the Media and let you shadow it.
The Shadowing tab's 1,2 and 3 options are for the amount of space after the track when you use the 'auto' advance mode.

Planned:
lots of hardening and validation
export to one big mp3 with gaps
export text to pdf a-la- a proper shadowing book

[edit: added more font options]

Lol1: The dude in the video looks pretty funny (or well, mentaly disturbed) - I have the opportunity though to walk long walks without being spotted, so I will give it a try.
Lol2: He is reading from "Assimil - Chinese with Ease II". I have completed this book as in I put most sentences from it in anki including mp3. (and 98% of them are mature cards)

@nukemarine - this book comes with audio-cds, so I guess he listened to it before and already knows it kinda-like by-heart. But he uses the book to help him out here. He does advocate however to repeat audio and discourages from using a book together with audio because the results are worse.

I just tried the marching around while shadowing technique and holy crap does it feel like it works. The forced march and posture kept me 100% focused on the shadowing instead of being able to drift off to lala land. This is definitely a must try technique.

Mistamark, that looks promising. I'm going to try it out.

Mistamark, attempted to run the program. Got a "Requires Microsoft.DirectX Version 1.0.2902.0 be installed in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) first".

Nukemarine Wrote:Mistamark, attempted to run the program. Got a "Requires Microsoft.DirectX Version 1.0.2902.0 be installed in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) first".

The app is trying to use some features of the DirectX (gaming/video/music) api. It looks like you might not have it installed.. you can get it from Microsoft here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/detai...laylang=en

Looking at the size of it, I'll try to remove the dependancy from the next version.

If you install this and it doesn't work, please tell me! Also, any suggestions are more than welcome.

For other developers: handling MP3 in .NET is a bit of a pain!

As an update, I have started to work on the export to MP3 player functionality (ie; play the iKnow / subs2Srs speech and then automatically insert the correct amount of silence for you to shadow back or just as spacing between tracks)

I've uploaded a new version that will let you export to an mp3. I've also eliminated the dependency on the DirectX dll; that was madness!!

The new version is here

http://intheshiz.net/post/2009/03/15/S2Shadowing.aspx


install and run it.
load in an anki tab exported text file
if needed point to the .media folder
then click on load data.

next, the shadowing tab will let you select and shadow specific sentences

finally, the export tab bill let you (at the moment) export it to a winamp playlist
and export to a single mp3 with automatically inserted silence between the sentences.

once again, this is still very much development code and only intended as a community preview!

any comments more than welcome as usual!

mistamark, sounds like you have a pretty sweet thing going on here. I will try it when I get off work. Thanks for the contribution.

You know, musician Peter Gabriel once said he must ride in a car or, preferably, a train to write his lyrics. He said that the stimulation of his peripheral vision focused him and opened up all his creative senses. Kind of like how we all seem to get our best ideas riding in the car.

I don't know of any science to back that up, but I find the same works with me. I've never thought of doing it for language learning though.

:"D Time to try something new.

wait so like...how are you able to walk the streets yelling out a foreign language without feeling like an asshat..if it wasn't for that I would be allover this technique. I even live in crowded ass tokyo..I get bad enough glares when i go running..now imagining my self shadowing out loud...oh no way!

Yeah, that's my problem, too. I'm on a college campus. It's crowded. People like to stare even when you're not going on and on... I can only imagine what it would be like if I walked around with headphones in, speaking Japanese. I'd like going to a park or something, though... that'd help...

Or just look crazy. We must make some pretty big sacrifices for fluency

Just do it with your mobile held to your ear -- everybody will simply think you're on the phone :-)

Yeah, if you don't want to hold a phone you could get a bluetooth headset/earphone clip thing. People using those look like idiots anyways, but at least once you see that they're wearing one you don't think they're crazy.

A new version of S2Shadowing is available from here:

http://intheshiz.net/post/2009/03/25/S2S...pdate.aspx

This version will allow you to choose the mappings of the import file and create an MP3 with silences between the speech to your liking.

NB: it's still under development so it may fall down occasionally!

Any comments are welcomed!