Find your own voice (🎧)
English

Find your own voice (🎧)

by

language learning
adventure
language exchanges
dialogue
cats

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.

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