Find your own voice² (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.
Uuuh, that crisp sound! Nice :)
Great work! You can clearly hear a difference between the first version and this one 👍
Yes nice work! :-)
Hi. This was interesting: I played version one and version two simultaneously, and version two really showed marked improvement on the smoothness of the sentences. I am not a pronunciation expert by any long shot (I hate the sound of my own voice in my native language). My comments, therefore, may be not as great as someone with expertise. So ignore them if they are not helpful. Ok, here are my comments: The first post was very clear and easy to understand, the "German" pronunciation parsing did not bother me. English has so many accents that are all acceptable, I rarely see the need to change an accent as long as it is easy to understand. The second post was much more fluid, and if that was your goal, you succeeded. However, if you could combine the second post with the liveliness that was in the first post, it would be kicked up another notch into amazing. A lot of native English speakers are not very dynamic - so there is nothing particularly appealing about just sounding "native." A dynamic English sentence is fluid, however, in my mind, there is a lot of interest that is conveyed in how long and distinctly (and for some spice, occasionally how loudly) the important words in each sentence are spoken. So a sentence will be fluidmumblefluidmumblefluidmumble -aaaaaaannnnn thn somethiNG imPORTanT .. willbeannounced. When I was listening to your second post, my washing machine was on spin cycle and sounded like an airplane taking off. I am used to the majority of words being drowned out, as long as I can hear the important words since those are usually pronounced longer and more distinctly than the rest of the words. It is hard to explain, but the gist is, you need to combine the two posts. The fluidity of the second one with an occasional distinct break of dynamism as you had in the first post - German pronunciation, Spanish, Japanese, it doesn't matter, is fine, these are the words that you as an individual are dwelling a split moment longer on and it is your own personality, no prescribed formula, in such cases - as long as it draws our attention to those words. I recorded your post as a native English speaker - not by any long shot as a skilled orator of course, just an average person on the street: https://voca.ro/1hXyBHN6e7u8