Use Lang-8 and Cinch to get your foreign-language speech corrected

I previously explained how to use Lang-8 and Snapvine to get recordings of your foreign-language speech corrected. Unfortunately, Snapvine is going out of business tomorrow, but Cinch comes through to let you do pretty much the exact same thing.

How to do it, after the jump.

Read more... I've so far tried this out only once in Italian, with the following recording:


It worked just as expected; Lang-8 users quickly came back and told me where I was screwing up.

Here's the step-by-step process:

1. You'll need accounts on both Lang-8 and Cinch, so go ahead and sign up for those.
2. Once you've done that, go to your Cinch and click on "Record a Cinch".
3. Press the button to record a message.
4. Add up to 140 characters of text as a title or the like and press "Submit".
5. Click "Link" under your profile pic next to the recording. (If you can't do this right away because the recording is "Pending", try reloading the page; that resolved the issue for me.)
6. Copy the URL from your browser window.
7. Head on over to Lang-8 and click on "Write a new entry".
8. Now paste the URL that you copied over on Snapvine into your entry, add in any additional text you want (an explanation of what you're hoping they'll do is probably helpful), and submit it.
9. Await your corrections. They will arrive shortly!

Besides needing to jump through all the hoops noted above, I've got two complaints about this set-up on Lang-8. First, unless the correctors on Lang-8 actually correct some text as well, you can't provide Lang-8's "thanks points" to them. Second, there's no quick way for them to provide you with a recording of their own (although the above process works for corrections as well as for submissions). That said, you could always just get a native speaker's recording from RhinoSpike.

There are also two other issues with Cinch that weren't issues with Snapvine. First, Cinch puts an annoying "Cinch!" at the beginning of each audio recording, so you have to hear that stupid piece of branding repeated every single time you listen to a Cinch recording. Second, as far as I can tell, Lang-8 does not support direct embedding of CinchCast audio as it did for Snapvine, so you've just gotta provide the URL so that your Lang-8 friends can click through to Cinch's site to provide you with feedback.

What would truly be spectacular is if Lang-8 would support this right out of the box. Doing it through Cinch is OK, but the process could be made much more streamlined.

One more cool thing about Cinch is the number of ways you can get audio recordings on there. One way is that you can call a U.S. number on your cellphone to leave recordings (and then add them to Lang-8 later). They've also got an iPhone app that you can use to record and upload audio files whenever the mood hits you, so you can record some foreign-language speech, upload it to Cinch, and then make Lang-8 entries out of them to get your pronunciation, etc., corrected.

Get your foreign-language audio recordings corrected online for free

I've already given you the low-down on how to get your foreign-language writings corrected online for free. Now I'd like to turn to how to get your audio recordings corrected for free.

Unfortunately, your options here are still pretty limited. As far as I can tell, there are only two places where you can submit recordings and get them corrected by native speakers, neither of which are close to making the feature ideal: Livemocha and Lang-8.

Read more... Lang-8

• Overview. Lang-8, based in Tokyo, is a two-person project by Yangyang Xi, CEO, and Kazuki Matsumoto, CTO, that focuses letting language learners get their texts corrected. However, with this little tip, which Lang-8 supports by making adding audio easy, you can get your audio recordings corrected as well.


• Content. Lang-8 is set up as a journal or a blog, but you're free to post whatever you feel like posting.


• Making corrections. Correctors can leave comments for you, explaining what you did wrong. There's no feature for them to record a message for you directly. Although they could leave a recording in the comments in the same way it can be posted in the entry's body, no one has done so yet for me.


• Speed of corrections. Just as with text, the corrections come very rapidly. Waiting a day for corrections would be a long time to wait.


• Correction presentation. It is up to individual correctors to apply formats: bold, strike-thru, red, and blue text. Your results will vary.


• Languages. You can post in any language you want, and native speakers of all major languages are well represented on the site. I'd wager that it'd take longer to get corrections for less frequently studied languages, but I've not tested that hypothesis.


• Interface. Lang-8's interface is alright; it's nothing to rave about, but it gets the job done.


• Bottom line. I love that I can record whatever I feel like recording to Lang-8, but I don't like it takes a bunch of steps to post audio recordings and that there's no easy way to post audio recordings in the comments.

Livemocha

• Overview. Livemocha's main product is it's Rosetta Stone-like language-learning courses, but the coolest thing it does is connect you with tons of native speakers, including through corrections of your audio recordings (see my complete review of Livemocha here).


• Content. For audio recordings, you're supposed to read outloud a text related to your lesson; there's no discretion involved in what you're supposed to record. Learners can and sometimes do add their own audio at the beginning or the end of the recordings, but they generally follow the script. Of course, you don't have to follow the script and you can surely find flexible human users who'll correct your audio recording for you regardless of what it contains.


• Making corrections. Correctors can easily record their own recordings in reply to your audio recording, which is the major benefit of submitting audio recordings for correction on Livemocha. Correctors also get a comment field in which they can make comments and variously format the comment text.


• Speed of corrections. Livemocha has a very large user base, so corrections come back very quickly, certainly comparable with Lang-8.


• Correction presentation. If there's an audio recording attached to a comment, it's readily available for you at the click of a button. Like Lang-8, it is up to individual correctors to format their textual comments. Again, your results will vary.


• Languages. Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu.


• Interface. As far as getting audio recordings corrected goes, I've got no major complaints. The interface allows you to get the job done.


• Bottom line. While I love that correctors can easily supply their own recordings in response to yours, I don't like that you're nominally limited to Livemocha's specified scripts.

Despite the inability of my correctors to easily supply audio recordings in their comments, I've tended to use Lang-8 more for getting my audio recordings corrected, largely due to its content flexibility. Nevertheless, there is a lot of room for improvement—whether on one of these sites or on the site of a new provider of this feature.

Use Lang-8 and Snapvine to get your foreign-language speech corrected

Update: Snapvine closed shop on March 31, 2010, but you can still get your foreign-language speech corrected on Lang-8 using a similar service called Cinch.

Lang-8 is designed to help you get your writing corrected, but with a little help from a tool called Snapvine, you can also get your speech corrected.

How to do it, after the jump.

Read more... While using Lang-8 lately, I noticed that one of my Japanese-speaking correctors often submits posts in English where he additionally includes both the Japanese text and an audio recording of the Japanese. Now, him providing the Japanese is a boon for Japanese learners, but it quickly dawned on me that this could work in the other direction just as easily; Lang-8 users could critique audio recordings of learners' target language speech.

To provide these audio recordings, he used Snapvine, which allows you to record "audio blogs". Today, I put this idea to the test with the following two audio recordings, the first in Japanese and the second in Chinese:

Comment | Copy This

Comment | Copy This

Sure enough, I got back corrections for the audio recordings on Lang-8 just as I would for any written submission. And it's real easy to do. Here's how:

1. You'll need accounts on both Lang-8 and Snapvine, so go ahead and sign up for those.
2. Once you've done that, go to your homepage in Snapvine and click on "create new post".
3. Now you can record a message. By default, it selects your phone as the way to record, but click on the tab "Microphone" to use your computer's mic. Record away.
4. Add a title (and any of the other things that you care to add—you'll see what's there on the page) and press "Publish".
5. Click "Share" and copy the URL that you find under the text "Copy and paste this URL into an email or instant message".
6. Head on over to Lang-8 and click on "Write a new entry".
7. Now paste the URL that you copied over on Snapvine into your entry, add in any additional text you want (I've been putting in a little bit of an explanation), and submit it.
8. Await your corrections. They will arrive shortly!

Besides needing to jump through all the hoops noted above, I've got two major complaints about this set-up. First, unless the correctors on Lang-8 actually correct some text as well, you can't provide Lang-8's "thanks points" to them. Second, there's no quick way for them to provide you with a recording of their own (although the above process works for corrections as well as for submissions).

What would truly be spectacular is if Lang-8 would support this right out of the box. Doing it through a quick trip to Snapvine is OK, but the process could be made much more streamlined.

One more cool thing about Snapvine is the number of ways you can get audio recordings on there. One way is that you can call a number on your cellphone to leave recordings (and then add them to Lang-8 later). That of course is applicable to the iPhone as well, but with the iPhone you also can benefit from another of Snapvine's features: audio file uploading. By using the iPhone Voice Memo app whenever the mood hits you, you can record some foreign-language speech, upload it to Snapvine, and then make Lang-8 entries out of them to get your pronunciation, etc., corrected. Very sweet.