Listening to Audiobooks

[phills]

@TofuChris thanks for asking!   I am about 100 hours in now.  I took a 10 day break in February, when I got discouraged by the slowing progress, but I'm back on the treadmill now.  I was going to update with stats when I get to 120 hours or so.  I only generate a new data point every 5-10 hours (not enough has changed otherwise).

 

I'm about half new books, half old books at this point.  The new books are mainly sequels of things I read, where I generally know the plot but haven't exactly read the material before.  I'm also watching Reset the tv series. 

 

For the first time recently, I was able to listen to an audio book while doing dishes, with ok comprehension!

 

I did run into the problem of becoming bored / distracted with pure listening.  That was part of what slowed my progress in mid February.  It's ironic, because one of my goals when starting this was to be able to listen to material, while doing other stuff (like chores).  I still want to do that, but you can't actually learn (well) that way.

 

So now, when free listening, I open a window and take notes (in English).  Like I'm in school, going to a lecture.  They don't have to be great notes; but it keeps me focused on what I'm listening to.  And that way even when I get lost, I can look back up at my old notes and feel assured I mostly understood the material.  That's about 2/3rds of my total listening time.

 

The other 1/3rds of the time, I keep the original material open in another window, and  glance over every 15-20 seconds or so to make sure I'm comprehending everything I heard. I used to have to do this to ensure learning, but now I only do it as a change-up and to catch any stray words that I get wrong.  Approx 10% of the time, I will test myself with my script to see how many times I need subtitle help. 

 

That's my new routine now.   

[TofuChris]

@phills Excellent answer! Will try some of these ideas when getting back into listening.

[phills]

@TofuChris Glad you found it helpful!  Feel free to add your experiences & results to the thread.  I'd love to see how others approach practicing their listening and compare routines and results.

[Insectosaurus]

On 1/28/2022 at 7:45 AM, phills said:

BTW, I may be oversensitive, but is the female version an AI voice? 

 

It's Microsoft Azure's TTS.

 

I think the question has been posed before, but does anyone know of a good way of buying and listening to audiobooks on Ximalaya from outside of China? Having just finished 孽子 I'd love to listen to the audio book (and others). 

[phills]

On 3/6/2022 at 5:44 PM, Insectosaurus said:

It's Microsoft Azure's TTS.

 

Good ear!  I looked up Azure and there's a demo right on the page:

 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/#features

 

It's funny that the sample text has 2 instances of "语言" in it.  It sounds quite like that narration in the youtube video.