Find your own voice (read aloud)
Hello there,
the idea of this post is to try out something new. Journaly has a very welcoming community, so I think it could actually work out quite well.
What the heck am I talking about?
Some days ago, I had the idea of recording myself while reading my last Journaly post. That was a Dutch post about, obviously, physics. Yes, I mostly write about physics, mathematics, programming and the like. I'm sorry, that's kind of my thing. Some people (hi, Uly!) cherish creepy bedtime stories, but I happen to enjoy reading and writing informative texts. That's just me. But I digress.
At any rate, I find that it's important to practice and hopefully thereby also improve one's spoken language. That's why I'm writing (and reading out loud) this post. Now, it's not easy at all to record myself, but I think the outcome is worth the effort.
After my initial attempt at not blaming myself with my Dutch, Linda jumped on board and directly recorded three different posts: One in Italian, one in European Portuguese, and one in her German dialect (that one was unexpected). The feedback given was, in all four cases, really helpful. Now I'm writing this in English to (a) talk about these initial steps and reach a hopefully broader circle of readers, and (b) invite everyone around here to try the recording exercise for themselves.
Ideally, I imagine following the following steps: First you write a Journaly post and get feedback from competent fellow Journalers (and from me). Then you record yourself reading the corrected post and upload it with a link to the audio recording. There are websites like https://vocaroo.com/ where you can either record yourself directly using the web browser, or upload the previously recorded file.
The charm of the written post with the attached or linked audio file is that it can be corrected directly within Journaly. Journaly offers a magnificent mechanism to give feedback: Just select a word, a phrase, or for my part, the whole text, and give feedback on the pronunciation of that piece of text.
Another kind of activity could be to leave feedback and comments by speaking instead of writing. What I like the most about some of my posts is when a nice little discussion develops. Sometimes it's a more or less casual conversation, at times there are bad jokes and here and there you may find a cat GIF. I can't offer you those in spoken form, but so be it.
That's it. Please let me know what you think about all this.
Bye for now.
Very cool idea Eduard! Beautiful English too.
That's a great idea, because this way, Journaly can also help improving the spoken language. I just gave it a try myself and read out one of my Italian posts :)
And I really enjoyed listening to your recording, it adds character to the text 🤗
Before I listen to the recording, I have to say the English is excellent — native level even 👍🏻🤩
What a great idea! Maybe I'll make an audio, too. I enjoyed listening to yours and could easily understand everything you said 😊
I understood everything you said, good job. In terms of your pronunciation, I think your English has been influenced by the choppiness of German. There's isn't enough distinction between long and short vowels, and the flow of speech is, well, again, kind of choppy. Having said that, all the words are pronounced correctly and are intelligible (note that Portuguese should sound like por-chu-geez). Keep up the good work! I think eventually Robin should add a feature that allows people to also record their posts if they want to. What a great idea 👍🏻
Great idea! I will use it for sure! Thanks for this post! :)
Title: Find Your Own Voice
I think that this is a fantastic idea, and as far as I can tell, it works very well! I received a lot of valuable feedback!
I also think that including audio into the platform is on Robin's list for future features. We just have to be patient and support him on this journey.
This is a great initiative. I really like the idea of recording a corrected version of a text, that way we can use the recordings to focus primarily on helping each other with pronunciation and diction, which for me, are the hardest parts of any language to really master 👏 👏
Wow, that’s a great idea!! I'll try :D
Great idea! I will try this for sure.
Great idea!
CocoPop: What do you exactly mean by the choppiness of German? While recording I tried to speak as clear as possible, and I guess I therefore talked slower than I'd normally do and with-such-pauses-between-single-words (is that at all the problem?). Do you find the pauses between words too long, or what should I concentrate on in order to improve?
@palabritas, Caro, Uly, @ManeskinQueen, Dimitris, Linda, @Semaphoro, Tomo, Jashan and Cloudy: Thanks for the nice comments and the appreciation! I'm looking forward to hearing from you :)
That's kind of it. The phrasing isn't English — it's more German. For instance, in the first sentence: the idea of this post is to try out something new you said [ðǝ ʔaɪ̯diːe ʔavðɪsˈpʰɔst(!) ʔɪstʰu tʰraɪ̯ ˌʔaʊ̯t(!) sʌmθɪŋ nju(!)]. The phrasing there is clearly German. With proper phrasing, it should sound something like this: [ðiyaɪ̯diːe͡ ǝvðɪsˈpʰoʊ̯ːst͜ ɪstʰǝ ˌtʰraːˈyæʊ̯t sʌmθɪŋ njuː]. So what I mean is that you already know the sounds, but you need to learn to form phonological words and apply a calmer, more fluid phrasing. I can help you with that if you're interested. I've been working with Dustin on Zoom and he's really coming along 😉
By the way, I'm assuming you can read the IPA, if not, that would be a good thing to study if you're looking to improve your pronunciation in any language.
That's a great idea! Congrats Eduard! I'm very impressed. Your reading was very good because you were reading your post with the tone so that we could understand easier what you wanted to share with us :)
Thank you a lot, this is helpful! I can't really read everything of the IPA you wrote (I don't know what the ? stands for, for example), but I think I can mostly understand it. So I have a sort of casual knowledge out of sporadic Wikipedia searches over the years, nothing substantial or systematic. Well, I guess I'd even be more nervous in a Zoom call where I know my pronunciation is going to be ripped apart, but I think it could certainly help :)
Michael, you definitely are impressive (I mean, I wrote a post about you xD), but I think you mean you were "impressed". Thanks! Yes, this was the idea. Man, was I nervous... I hate doing this sort of stuff :D
I don't rip pronunciations apart — I put them back together))) I'm a phonological reconstructive surgeon, Dr. Ulisses Menció, PRS
hahaha that's very reassuring!
By the way, the symbol [ʔ] is a glottal stop, which means that you abruptly and completely cut off the flow of breath — very typical of German phrasing.
Oh, ok, that's a glottal stop. Yeah, I internalized this (apparently too much) when learning German pronunciation :D. I didn't know I misuse it in English! But yeah, here in Germany I really must pay attention tonotstarttalkinglikethis (like in Spanish or Catalan, where everything is tangled together), especially once I start speaking faster. Ok, so I think with English I should start by relaxing this tendency and going back to the roots :P. In my next recording, I'll have a very strong Spanish accent instead.
Phew, I'm glad to hear you say that — I didn't want you to think I was picking on you. But what you're describing is exactly what I was picking up on when I listened to your recording. It was just more German than English.
Yes I made a mistake. I mean I am impressed of course :D I corrected the mistake by the way!
I see. No, I never thought that. I mean, I uploaded the recording for a reason (and to be honest, after leaving like 130 comments on Caro's catalan text, everything else people do to my posts is innocent :D). Do you think it's a good idea to record myself reading this post once more, or should I take a new one?
Michael: That was a great mistake xD.
I think you should have a few sessions with me and then unveil your new and improved English pronunciation down the line in the same post, so that your fans can marvel at your progress 😉
🥶🥶🥶 all right then...
What a great idea! Thanks for that :). Will definitely consider doing the same! Further it was really nice to hear your voice and your english is really awesome like Uly already said... Wow!
I never thought about this. Good idea!
Uly, I'm gonna upload a new version of this audio recording, even before we had any improvement sessions. I'm only doing this to document the (hopefully!) improving process and receive further feedback, so I hope that's OK to you.
Here it goes 🤦♂️: https://journaly.com/post/16948
Not that you need my permission, but I think it's an excellent idea! It shows that you're committed to improving 👍🏻
One of the features on the Journaly roadmap that I've been incredibly excited about since the beginning is the ability to include audio recordings on posts (or even to create audio-only posts) and to then build a special notion of "temporal comments" where you will be able to highlight a portion of the audio and leave a comment on it, just as we do with inline feedback comments 😊 I'm definitely planning for this to be built this year ✨
I believe this will be hugely impactful and really introduce a whole new dimension to Journaly, both in terms of how much it enables us to help each other, and also further enriching the community feeling ⭐️
That sounds like a dream come true! The first post I recorded was a very emotional one I had written, and it was incredible to be able to bring it to life with my own voice and give it the tenor I inteded and it deserved. I can't wait for this feature. Great work!
Thank you for sharing that feedback @CocoPop! I'm glad you love the sound of this feature 😊
Robin, now that we have notifications, is there any way to opt out of the emails?