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Seems like an interesting idea. I look forward to using my sexy voice to help others learn English.
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Wow, sounds AWESOME! Hopefully there are some native japanese speakers on there helping out.
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I really hope this site's userbase grows, because it has some serious potential. Obviously it's quite new so there isn't a whole lot of anything yet, but given some time, I can definitely see it taking off and becoming an awesome resource for listening.
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How the @ is that post even helpful... to anyone?
Seems like it was posted just to see if anyone would read it.
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Yeah it's a great idea, lots of potential there. I can imagine other sites will incorporate it as well.
Personally I also still want to see stuff like rather than certain texts, having people in Japan or native Japanese speakers record natural dialogue of others or themselves, respectively--perhaps w/ transcripts. Not spoken as if it's being recorded, but just natural... I mentioned it in that 'is it better to go to another country' thread. In other words, a rich multimedia repository of the kind of audio you'd hear regularly if you were in Japan.
Same with video/sound tours, something along the lines of Sarah Peeble's Walking Through Tokyo but language-rich rather than ambient sounds, and quite unlike that Tokyo Realtime stuff.
I guess online community + P2P-esque reciprocity is key, though.
Edited: 2010-03-29, 12:57 am
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Very cool, great idea, nice web site. There sure are a lot of people learning Japanese!
And that's an excellent idea nest0r - I was thinking similarly that the other day.
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You guys are laughing at that post, but -any- text read by a native would be helpful, especially for shadowing. I see someone named 'mullr' already did it, but I was going to do it tonight if nobody else had.
You know what's more useful for shadowing than a text read by a native? A text that you are interested in, read by a native.
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It really needs a recorder in the browser, if one needs to open audacity, have it on a window next to the broswer to be able to read, save, go to the upload, search for the path where you saved and upload, all those small but really annoying steps would kill any contribution...
Wake me up when they have it implemented
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I allready joined and invited my friends. We need to help these kinds of sites to grow and branch out.
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Liosama recorded a clip and he has an Australian accent. Native is native.
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srsly, the more diverse a collection of accents, the better, I'd imagine. I know that as a Japanese learner, I love hearing various Japanese accents and the subtle differences between them. English being many times more rich with accents and dialects, I'd certainly think the more the merrier.
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Thanks ts for posting about RhinoSpike here! This thread has brought more people to our site than any other single source according to Google Analytics.
And thanks everybody for all the encouraging comments! RhinoSpike has gotten a really warm reception, especially from the Japanese-learning community.
A couple of comments:
1) As of right now, 100% of Japanese Audio Requests have been recorded by native speakers. Japanese is the most active language on the site right now, so don't hesitate to make requests!
2) We are working on a native browser-based recorder. It will come.
3) All accents are welcome and encouraged! We received a feature request and will be adding an "Accent" field to the profiles where you can specify your accent. Each recording will be tagged with the recording user's accent and it will show up next to the playback widget. This way you can see at a glance what accent the text is spoken with, and you can listen to multiple recordings of the same text to compare accents. You could even use it to learn how to speak in another accent of English if you wanted to. So New Zealand and Irish accents are very welcome! Like Burritolingus said, the more the merrier!
4) Leeching is of course allowed, but we have the system setup to reward contributors by bumping their Audio Requests forward in the queues. This will have a more noticeable effect as the site gets more activity.
5) I think RhinoSpike will have a lot of synergy with other language learning sites.
For example, with lang-8 you could write a diary entry in Japanese, get it corrected, and then submit the corrected entry to RhinoSpike for native audio. Then you could practice listening to and pronouncing your own thoughts with native Japanese pronunciation.
Smart.fm could replace a lot of the text-to-speech audio content with native speaker audio from RhinoSpike.
LingQ users could use RhinoSpike to get native audio and import content in a language that's not their own.
If anybody has any more ideas on how to integrate RhinoSpike with existing tools, I'd like to hear it.
6) We launched 5 days ago and we already have 220+ users and Recordings in 10 languages. Thanks for signing up and helping to spread the word.
If you have any questions or comments, let me know.
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Tummai, I don't suppose you'd consider expanding your site a bit?
Snapvine is closing down and it was the previous best way to record your non-native speech and have it corrected on Lang-8. We could -really- use a good site to fill that gap. It was especially nice that you could post your snapvine directly on Lang8 and people could listen and correct it there.
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<pet peeve>Hmm, another site where you don't seem to be able to do anything without creating an account and logging in. I don't want to do that if I'm just wandering past -- I want to see if there's enough interesting content there for it to be worth my creating an account. If the front page doesn't have some clear links to actual content, rather than a signup page, it's just turning people away pointlessly...</peeve>
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Is there a way to delete recordings that you've posted?
