7.5 hours of MP4 speaking and listening files - free

[kurtinchina]

These files can be used on a phone to practice pronunciation. At the top you see the a sentence in pinyin - at the bottom you see the characters. They are separated in case you are learning to read Chinese. You hear the sentence, then there is silence, you repeat the sentence, then the next sentence is spoken. These can be downloaded for free with no obligation at www.sayitinmandarin.com

[mungouk]

Hi Kurt,

 

Do we need to sign up for a "Teachable" account to access this, or is it elsewhere in your site?

 

 

[Flickserve]

Just wondering why mp4.

 

It's a video format. 

 

Note I haven't downloaded it yet as I don't have access to my computer

[roddy]

Presumably so you can see the text at the same time - perhaps not the most efficient method, but if you want something to be easily used on a phone...

[Jan Finster]

4 hours ago, kurtinchina said:

www.sayitinmandarin.com

 

Hello Kurt,

 

thanks a lot. I only checked 2 lessons, but they seem useful sentences for beginners. Nice effort from Rose and yourself. If you give them away for free, you could consider uploading them to Youtube, if you have VPN. That way, you reach a bigger audience.

 

 

[kurtinchina]

It is MP4 because - first you see a little dot next to a sentence and then there is a square around the sentence - during the time the square is there, it is silent. You repeat the sentence, then it goes to then next one.

[kurtinchina]

Jan Finster suggested that I post these on YouTube. I hadn't thought of that. Might do that. I do have one video on YouTube that is quite long. I read a comment on a forum that said something about being tired of edutainment (five ways to say "hi" in Chinese , etc.) so I posted a 30 minute video that is a "Chinese Primer". It explains to a beginner what they are getting into when they take on Mandarin. Definitely educational.

 

Have a look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GdHK4Y-oUk

[kurtinchina]

My website www.sayitinmandarin.com has the following :

 

For sale :

1. A Textbook with accompanying Workbook (the MP4 voice files support every Chinese sentence in those two books - you can download those for free)

2. Access to a Teachable pronunciation program that is $15 USD

 

(introduction videos are on the site - they tell you everything about the two things above)

 

For free download:

3. A stroke order book (pdf) that has a short tutorial on how to write Chinese characters and the stroke order sheets for all 653 characters introduced in the Textbook (in the order they appear in the book). (I think the best way to learn to write is by copying sentences. - You peek at the sentence less and less since you write the same characters a lot.

4. Three PDFs that are a study on machine translations. I translated two articles from the internet using google and then refined the translation so that it was really good. Interesting to see just how good the machine translations are. The third PDF has some Tic Tok pictures. I translated the captions. Interesting to see how people use the language in that environment.

 

 

 

[roddy]

3 hours ago, kurtinchina said:

I translated two articles from the internet using google and then refined the translation so that it was really good. Interesting to see just how good the machine translations are.

If you like doing that kind of thing, it'd be interesting to feed it the same original text every few months and see how it's learning. 

[kurtinchina]

That is an interesting idea. I have seen changes through the years. A good example how the different car company names come out. Some of them are translated and some are not. Probably from the algorithm's added experience.

 

What makes that idea of comparisons more complex is that - if you translate an entire paragraph - you get one version. When I need clarification on a particular word or phrase, I cut it down to one sentence  or cut the paragraph in half. You end up with a very different version or the same sentence.