via AJATT: "RhinoSpike is an online language learning community tool that lets users around the globe connect and exchange foreign language audio files. Get any foreign language text read aloud for you by a native speaker... "
http://rhinospike.com/
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.
Last edited by nest0r (2010 March 29, 12:57 am)
trusmis
Member
Registered: 2009-07-14
Posts: 103
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
tummai
Member
From: Japan
Registered: 2008-03-14
Posts: 24
Website
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.
