News: Laying the Foundation pt.3

Having fun with those sentences

So now you have about 30-50 sentences sitting in front of you and you've read through them, but don't quite have a feel for how they are supposed to sound. This is very demotivational because if you can't hear the flow of the sentence, you may be afraid that you are learning it incorrectly and that can really be a tough obstacle to get through.

In this section we will bring these sentences to life, and introduce you to something that is going to make your language learning experience very pleasurable.

Step 1 Signing up for a RhinoSpike account

RhinoSpike is a community of people that help each other with native pronunciation of text. You can sign up here and it is completely free. Once you've signed up you can mess with your profile and poke around a bit.  So, go ahead and do that and come back here when you're ready to bring those sentences to life.

Step 2 Submit your first request

Now that you have signed up you can submit text to the community to be recorded and placed in the same area as your text:

1. Go here, or click "Submit" to bring you to the submission form.
2. Fill out the title of your submission and select the language from the drop-down box.
3. In notes you can specify how it should be read. I suggest putting something like, "Read a bit slower than normal."
4. Copy and paste your text into the "Text" box (these are all of your sentences).
5. Hit the "create" button.

This will put your submission into a queue with many others' submissions, so you might not get a quick reply but I've experienced really fast turnovers for some of my languages.

While waiting for your sentences to be recited, you can look around the site and find people that are learning your native language that speak your target language. You should also record things in your target language for other people as it builds good relationships and may even bump you up the queue.

Also, go ahead and send me a friend request here. I love to meet other language learners!

Remember to go to the forums and request what language you would like me to do a video on! I will be creating a video for each of these steps.