In praise of "Speaking"

Language Learning
#1

I have discovered how good the “Speaking” skill game is.

I had long avoided this because the voice recognition seemed like it would be unreliable. In fact, it is unreliable. But a bit of frustration–when, for example, the recognition simply can’t hear the difference between “prendre” and “rendre”–is a small price to pay for an extremely effective drill.

First, there are words which I memorized by spelling but never tried to pronounce. My pronunciation of them was untested, and, as it turned out, sometimes incorrect. Words that you cannot pronounce correctly are not words that you can use in conversation. In fact they are landmines.

Second, and relatedly, the voice recognition forces you to make those difficult consonant and vowel sounds in your target language again and again. In my case, it is the French “r.” If I don’t make a convincing “r” sound, I don’t get points. (You can see the wrong words the AI thinks you are saying as you say them.)

Third, to correctly prompt the voice recognition, you have to say the whole sentence, or at least the part up to the cloze. When I just type in answers rather than speaking them, I often don’t even bother to read the whole sentence. Reading the whole sentence gives you bonus vocabulary and grammar for free.

Fourth, the standard typing game puts a lot weight on spelling skill. If you leave out a silent “e,” you get the question wrong. In my view, spelling ultimately isn’t so important, because these days we always have autocorrect or spellcheckers. Of course I would love to have immaculate French spelling, but the language is an orthographic nightmare, and I care much more about learning to speak with good pronunciation.

Fifth, you can speak answers faster than you can type them. Even with frustrating repetitions to get the speech recognition to hear what I am saying, I can still burn through more questions than I can with typing. My preference is to play Clozemaster fast and run up my score.

6 Likes
#2

How do you find your recall of the vocabulary you have learnt in speaking more during live conversation? Do you feel there has been a transfer? Also curious as to what collection/s you have been working with!

#3

You say you don’t get points if you don’t make a good ‘r’, but that’s not my experience. The system works like spell correction and tries hard to make sense of what you say. Your pronunciation can be off by a lot.

It’d be nice to get more granular phoneme-by-phoneme or intonation feedback, but I don’t know if that kind of thing exists anywhere.

#4

Yes, it is inaccurate. Sometimes you get marked correct for a a bad pronunctiation, sometimes you pronounce something correctly but for whatever reason it can’t hear it. But the thing is that you still have to try to pronounce correctly, because that is the only way you can improve your prospects. At least as far as I can figure.

#5

It is like talking to some AI customer service on the phone–annoying as that may be. What do you do? You exaggerate your pronunciation.

#6

I mainly do the Fast Track sets in French. I don’t know yet if I will have better recall during conversation. I do think that what mostly matters in conversation anyway is pronunciation, inflection, and confidence, rather than vocabulary recall. Speaking practice should help with those things.