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.

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.

Empathy to get rid of your accent?

Over on The Linguist on Language, Steve's discussing this study that concludes that "[t]he more empathy one has for another, the lighter the accent will be when speaking in a second language" and that "the 'language ego' is also influenced by the sociopolitical position of the speaker towards the majority group".

However, I'd say a lot of follow-up is needed before this can be considered a "conclusion".

Read more... First of all, the study was conducted with a grand total of 60 participants, all of whom were college students in Israel of the same socioeconomic characteristics: 20 native-Hebrew speakers, 20 native-Arabic speakers who started learning Hebrew around age 7, and 20 native-Russian speakers who started learning Hebrew around age 13. Enough for a hypothesis for further testing, perhaps, but conclusion? I don't think so.

In any case, here's what they had to do:

All were asked to read out a section from a report in Hebrew, and then to describe – in Hebrew - an image that was shown to them. The pieces were recorded and divided into two-minute sections. Additionally, the participants filled out a questionnaire that measures empathetic abilities in 29 statements.

Once that was done, 20 separate native speakers rated how heavy the accents were.

Both Russian and Arabic speakers were shown to have similarly heavy accents. However, the more empathetic the Russian speakers were, the weaker their accents. For the Arabic speakers, however, their level of empathy didn't affect the heaviness of their accents.

From this, the professors of the Israeli university conclude of the Arab students that:

[T]he pattern among Arabic speakers demonstrates their sentiment toward the Hebrew-speaking majority group, and the former consider their accent as something that distinguishes them from the majority.

Color me skeptical.

I'd be more accepting of these results if, instead of Russian speakers, they had used Arabic speakers that didn't carry the same sociopolitical baggage—Moroccan Jews, or something like that. As is, this could perhaps show nothing more than the fact that there's some connection between empathy and accent in Russian speakers.

I'd love to see this test repeated where they could get larger, more diverse samples, like in the U.S. or Canada. Would people from locales with widely varying cultures—e.g., Latin America, Japan, India, Croatia, etc.—show the same connection between empathy in their English accents? A study like that would be much more interesting; first establish the connection between empathy and accent, then move on to dissenting other things that might affect it.

Steve focuses on some of the findings' applications to language learners:

To learn a language is to imitate some of the behaviour of another group. You have to act as if you are one of them. . . . It is not enough to practice making certain sounds. You have to dive into the role of being someone else. You have to feel comfortable doing it. That means not translating comfortable sayings, and turns of phrase from your own language. It means forgetting who you are, linguistically and culturally.

If this position is right (and my inclination is that it is), it would seem to make sense that actors would be great language learners. I've never heard of any studies looking into that, but Brad Pitt's language-learning abilities don't bode well for the hypothesis.

While I do think their hypothesis is probably onto something, I think it's likely a lot more complicated that "the more the empathy, the better the accent". Mitch, in the comments on Steve's blog, points out a big hole in the hypothesis:

There were prisoners of war and camp inmates who learned German well enough to pass as natives after escape. They probably had zero empathy for their hated guards, but their motivation was incredible--survival.

So clearly there are cases of zero empathy, but great accents.

Links:
What Makes an Accent in a Foreign Language Lighter? [Newswise]
Accent and empathy [The Linguist on Language]