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.

Son's first word is ねんね ("sleep") in Japanese

With my obvious interest in language learning, it's great fun to have kids and watch how they learn languages. If you've been reading this blog, you know that my four-year-old daughter has long been a part of my language-learning observations, and now my son had joined the speaking world as well.

We've got what is essentially a trilingual environment set up for the kids. I and my mom, who lives with us, speak only English to the kids. My wife speaks only Japanese with them and we make them speak Japanese with each other (which has so far consisted of our daughter speaking Japanese to our son). We use only Chinese-speaking babysitters or nannies and have them around enough that our daughter speaks Chinese as well as English and Japanese.

Our son's first official word is nenne ねんね in Japanese, which means "sleep". It's the an infantile form of neru 寝る ("to sleep"). We give if the official designation because he's clearly saying the word and linking it up to a meaning that he can use to communicate with.

More observations of a one-year-old learning to speak, after the jump.

Read more...He's said lots of things that happen to be words. Mama, baba 爸爸 ("father" in Chinese), dada, etc., but he didn't seem to use these consistently enough to indicate things as to really count as his first word. He'd at times call me "Mama", or just yell it out randomly, for instance. However, he clearly uses nenne to convey a single meaning.

However, his interpretation of nenne meaning is a little different. When he says nenne, he lays down flat on his belly on something soft, whether a pillow, a bed, or a person. If you say nenne to him while in the living room, he'll grab a pillow from the couch, lay it on the floor, lay down on top of it and say "Nenne!" He'll use it when he lays down to go to sleep, etc.

There was one earlier contender for his first word, and that was ge 个 in Chinese. He'd point at things and say, "Ge!" We speculated that he got that from the ge in zhège 这个 ("this") nàge 那个 ("that"), which he heard from the babysitters. However, since the ge was only really part of the word, we couldn't really count that as his first word.

He's also got a few other close contenders. When an airplane flies overhead, he says, "Woooo!" in imitation of the noise it makes. When a car drives by, he says "Vroom!", again in imitation of the noise it makes, which happened to be among my daughters first words as well.

One interesting thing is that he got basic intonation down before he ever said a word. He could long ask a question by pointing and saying some syllable with a rising intonation to make a tone. He would give a warning when something was amiss, like a door being open that we usually kept shut, with a sharp, high tone. He's use a fall tone to indicate comfort or the like.

Gestures came in before words as well. That's a well-known phenomena; children whose parents use sign language end up learning to communicate with that long before their peers learn to speak. Pointing, nodding his head, shaking his head, clapping after doing something good, tilting his head to the side to indicate inquisitiveness, etc., are all among the gestures he learned early on.