Support for shadowing in Lingq
A
A.J.
An important tool to improve the ability to be understood (and to understand), is to improve pronunciation of words and the prosody of the sentence (melody, intonation and emphasis). Shadowing can lead to significant improvements, both for beginners, intermediate and advanced learners. I propose direct support in Lingq for shadowing.
Shadowing needs the following things:
* I need to be able to indicate the chunk I am shadowing in page mode.
* For listening, I need to play a chunk repetitively.
* I need to listen to the sound, without seeing the text. That way I can focus on remembering both text, pronunciation and prosody.
* I should be able to switch seeing the text on or off.
* As time stamps are currently on sentence level, the chunks will be on sentence level as well. A chunk contains one or more sentences.
* I need to record my voice and play back my recording. That way, I can compare my recording to the original spoken text.
* I would like every action to have a keyboard shortcut, so I don't have to grab the mouse every few seconds.
Keyboard shortcuts would be:
- Indicate start and end of a chunk, which can reside on the same page or on the next page.
- create a recording of the chunk (start and end of recording)
- Switch the text visibility on or off.
- play a chunks' original sound.
- play my recording.
I appreciate any feedback on this proposal or queries if it is not clear.
Mark Kaufmann
An interesting suggestion. I don't think we would enable chunks to be selected, so you would probably have to use sentence mode and do this for sentences. But adding a way to record yourself reading or pronouncing a sentence so that you can compare yourself to the original would be interesting. In terms of showing and hiding the text, I think realistically you're just going to have to look away when you don't want to read it.
A
A.J.
Mark Kaufmann Shadowing works in phases. The first phase is to shadow per sentence until satisfied. Once content with f.e. 3 sentences, you combine those into a chunk and read all 3 sentences as one block. Only then do you record and compare the recording with the original sound. You restart per sentence when necessary. If not, you move to the next chunk of sentences, to repeat the process. Once done, one can increase the chunk size to improve natural sounding speech consistently.
Chunking is an important part of shadowing. It works like scaffolding. You build up chunks until you are satisfied you have mastered the melody, tone, intonation and emphasis plus the pronunciation. Then you increase chunk size to consolidate your skill. Leaving that out, is a devaluation. A nice gimmick, to pretend to be shadowing on sentence level, but not as valuable as with chunking, where you can truly measure progress.
The mode of making text invisible and visible is less important. It has a different reason: to improve the short term memory of the mind, to contain more of the sentence or sentences. That helps with both speaking and listening. Leaving that off, is not a problem for shadowing as such. It would however add value, if included.
I would suggest a separate mode for chunking, next to sentence mode and page mode. That would prevent entanglement with the existing functions.
I hope you will reconsider doing it this way, as leaving off chunking makes it a lot harder to progress in pronunciation, i.e. to build your skill in smaller chunks of text, and gradually increasing in size and thus increasing your progress.