“Preferential Practice”
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This article belongs to the following series:
Audio Speed
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Great exercise as usual, quite useful! Please include that link to “nicht” as you promised at the beginning of the lesson. Danke schön.
I found this challenging and very helpful
I loved this exercise!!
Make sure to check out the other ones in this format that I have on the site. They’re for different verbs and essentially a “basic starter kit”. You can find them all under “pronunciation” here:
https://yourdailygerman.com/german-exercise-2/
on iphone 11, Gmail app: clicked to allow to use mic:
Brilliant exercise! All works except
– can’t replay my voice
(clicking play triangle by a result display turns the triangle to a pause permanently, with no sound)
– marks me maximum 5%
(ok, maybe I am that bad)
– writes almost all my words in pink, occasional words in yellow.
But still brilliant! Thanks.
Well, that’s the “normal” iphone issue then. I think in essence, nothing gets recorded, so you can’t hear anything and the AI gives a super low score (because it doesn’t get any data).
Maybe, if you have a different browser on the phone you could try with that one.
works
I often find that only the first of multipe voices is reorded (eg in Advent 5). I’m sing Firefox with Windows 10. Sonst ist es wunderbar.
You can scroll along the various recordings, when your mouse is inside the little box. It’s very hard to see though. I’ll work on the design soon.
Dies funktionierte perfekt auf meinem alten Motorola moto g. Eine fabelhafte Übung!
Chrome browser on Windows 11. Kein Problem. Sometimes it is difficult to detect where my pronunciation is not quite correct, but generally very helpful!!
Mine worked perfect on my Commodore 360 with the black and white screen.
That makes sense, because I actually coded it in Assembler and compiled it on C360.
I also made it backward compatible and it should run on ENIAC.
Google Pixel 4 Handi — es geht sehr gut, kein Problem.
Crome browser on a mac. Kein Problem
Super, good to know. Could you try on Safari by any chance?
I just tried again using Safari on an iMac (desktop) machine and everything *seems* OK, but you always obtain a blank audio recording. That is, the buttons turn on and off to indicate recording, the permission has been granted to record the microphone, the results come back in the right format via the AI, it’s just that the recording is always empty, so you end up with circa 0%. Harumph…
But Chrome, as mentioned above, continues to work like a champion.
Same here on Safari. It appears to record, but then has nothing in the recording. Playback of the recording generates a Not Supported error on the console.
For Chrome, I had to accept a third-party cookie from
widgets.wp.comto make it work. Before that, pressing the record button did nothing.Wow, now THAT is interesting feedback!!! This cookie is literally just for giving me visitor stats collected by wordpress.com, mainly to see where people are finding the site, so it has NOTHING to do with any of the recording or playing.
Also thanks for the console print for Safari! I now suspect it’s an ogg vs mp3 issue.
I’m probably way, way, way out of my depth here, but I doubt that Apple is going to be demanding anything to do with “ogg” files: it’s pretty much ignored them forever, as far as I can tell. What Safari does tend to *demand* is an mp4 audio file, and won’t recognise anything else as part of its MediaRecorder implementation. At least that’s where I imagine the treasure is buried ;-)
((Again, this should all be consumed with a giant handful of salt!))
Upon further investigation, it might also have to do with MediaRecorder not being supported, or partially supported but has to be enabled manually in the browser and it’s under “experimental features”.
I don’t know where I got this ogg info from. I feel like I read it in some forum a while back but I might be confusing things.
Hmm, that should have happened by around November 2020 according to the link below. That is, MediaRecorder should have been enabled by default. Hopefully I’m not further muddying the waters here, but reading this link also underlines that the mp4 (versus mp3) thing does seem to be a candidate for why it’s not working. Fingers crossed!
https://webkit.org/blog/11353/mediarecorder-api/
Amazing source!!
Thank you!!!! All I ever found were shitty unanswered forum posts on stackexchange, or the Apple forum.
I bookmarked it and will get back to it when I’ll give the recording a fixing.
I think I have narrowed down the issue to the following: some Mac devices record the audio blob in ogg format, but my entire code is specified to work with mp3. I think that MIGHT fix it, but I’m not sure, and I don’t have a Mac, so maybe, if I put the time in, it still won’t work then and that’s why I’m kind of ignoring this for the time being. I know it’s not the best, but I have so many different things to work on that this just never makes the priority bracket.
Apple thinks my german accent is really bad … no REALLY BAD … like only 4% intelligible
That’s a sign that the recording isn’t working. Have you tried to play your recording? And how does it sound?
Great fun! Viel Spaß.
I found that if my pronunciation was way off, I had to delete the first attempt, before I could record a second and hear my second attempt; otherwise, it would just repeat my first go.
But, it really is a great pronunciation learning tool.
Vielen Dank.
You can scroll down that result window to switch around between the attempts but it’s not very visible. I have to work on the design there :)
Hello, can you post the link to your lesson on Nicht, please. I can’t find it on the site
Here’s part one:
https://yourdailygerman.com/position-nicht-german/
The link to part two is at the end there :)
Ich glaube, dass es hört sich lieber andere Computer als meine.
Camille (mit Apple)
Ja, mit Apple gibt es leider manchmal Probleme :/
Can’t get it to like my pronunciation of “Yoga” but apparently I can say “Stretching” just like a true German XD
Wow, I’d love to hear it. I get 100% on both words, which I find stunning as they’re not really German. Good job on the AI training there!
I’m on the same page: it hates my “Yoga”, but loves my “Stretching” (which I didn’t even know was a *thing* in German. I actually started by pronouncing “Dehnung” or some formulation with “dehnen” before hearing the recommended solution.)
It also gives me grief for “als”, sad to say. I think I have to hang onto the “ell” for a little longer than expected (ie, leave the tongue touching the back of those front teeth!). Doing so seems to render the AI just a smidgeon(*) less snippy!
(*) Hey, I like that “smidgeon” can be spelt three ways: “smidgeon”, “smidgin”, and “smidgen” are all acceptable(ish). I’ll go for the bird-inspired version, and rank the lowest-common-denominator-of-languages-derived spelling second, leaving “smidgen” pitifully mired in its own banality. Apologies to anyone still reading at this point: “Ich gebe dem Rotwein die Schuld”. (Wie immer…)
How about “smaeghtdgeaun”
Vielleicht nach ein paar Gläsern mehr ;-)
Which –in a seriously spooky coincidence– isn’t too far from “Fhuair mi grèim air!”(#) in Scots-Gaelic…
(#) “Nailed it!”
Hah, Gaelic was what I was trying to “emulate” :D
I’d just like to stop and appreciate the phrase “pitifully mired in its own banality.” :)
My thoughts on “als”:
– There’s a glottal stop before the “a”. The sound from the middle of “uh oh” or the beginning of “apple.”
– The “a” doesn’t get held too long. Sometimes I use my flat hand to draw a line in the air so I remember to keep the same sound (no diphthong!) and pitch throughout.
– For the L, you can use the same position as the S. Tongue on the ridge behind your top teeth. I find I need less pressure than I’m used to in English. It can almost feel like the thought of an L. Light L like “life,” not a dark L like “all.”
– The S should be nice and hissy, no buzzing at all.
I think you really should think about starting a pronunciation guide or something. You have such a good understanding and insight for it!
Thank you very much, once again: on at least two of the points you’re bang-on. Namely, the diphthong (always something akin to kryptonite for me!), and die Auslautverhärtung, assuming we can file the “(hi)ss”-ness versus the “(bu)zz”-ness under that heading. For some reason (probably best left unprodded/unprobed) the pronunciation I had hard-baked in my noggin was more along the lines of “(g)ulls”, but with a final “z” sound.
I’ll take another run through through the examples above in the next day or so, and see if I can get those modifications to stick ;-)
Yeah, that’s Auslautverhärtung :) That and the glottal stops are part of the reason German can be perceived as sounding harsh.
Diphthongs are so baked into English, it’s hard to get rid of them. Even when it’s not a diphthong, there’s a tendency for your tongue to move a little as you say a vowel. It’s one of the hardest things for non-native speakers to learn, and it’s really hard to stop doing it.
I’m with you on wanting to put a buzzy s/z there. The voiced L would make it voiced in English.
Guten Morgen! Ich hatte keine Probleme. Aber ich habe einen Dell Laptop mit Windows 7 benutzt. Altmodisch, ich weiss, Bis spaeter!
Wow, das ist wirklich Old School :D. Aber Hauptsache, es funktioniert.
Great exercise thanks
Lets do this more often
Hallo,
You have a couple of typos this time:
“And the perfect day to get active and do a little exercise about
we’ll get active because today, it’s time for a little practice for” (You probably forgot to remove one sentence, so you need to pick the one you want to keep…)
“ieber, just like nicht or gern or whatever, stand BEFORE the action” (ieber, just like nicht or gern or whatever, stands BEFORE the action)
Haven’t done the exercises (yet) because I’m at the cafe working and well, imagine if I start speaking German to the PC… so I’ll have to try them later, when I’m home :)
Bis Morgen!