Hey I’m looking for audiobooks, similar to this one https://www.amazon.com/Since-Youve-Been-Gone/dp/B00K7I7S3W/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=since+you’ve+been+gone&qid=1587053195&sr=8-1
Off course, clear voice and clear American accent without any speech impediment. Stories about daily life, travel and Japan are most welcomed : )
Thank you for your help.
It may not be anything like the book you mention but my recommendation is:
“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity” by Yuval Noah Harari – I am reading it in French and listening to the audio.
Probably the best single book to read if you could only have one book since it covers all of the Universe (very quickly) and all of the breadth of human history and culture in some depth.
It’s also very interesting if you have an interest in anthropology or history.
I also like the Michael Connelly books, especially Harry Bosch, but be warned there is a lot of slang and many idioms from the police and crminals in these books. They work great for me to learn more unusual words and idioms in French translation.
Thanks for your recommendation I will definitely use your first book in the near future. The only reason why I usually read young adult literature is the simplicity of the language in them. Another thing is that knowledge from daily life books with many dialogues is easily convertible into daily speech. My English still isn’t in perfect shape, as I created 1500 lingq’s for my first 10000 words, even if I ignored every street, band, dish names, and regular ones it’s still a lot 
I don’t have any specific recomendations, but to potentially get some ideas you can go to amazon/audible and filter to young adult and then it will have further categories within that that you can focus on based on your interests. audible has samples that you can listen to to see if the speaker’s voice is something you can understand (also in audible you can speed up or slow down as needed).
Amazon as a warning has DRM on it that is pretty much impossible to remove…unless you have an old version of kindle for desktop + calibre + certain calibre extensions. I have never been successful but I have a newer version of kindle for desktop.
So I would tend to suggest finding another source where a book may be drm free. Unfortunately, I’m not sure where.
If you like fantasy you can check out the Harry Potter books…purchase them from the pottermore website because they are drm free there. Not daily life per se, so it may not be exactly the dialogue interactions you’re looking for.
For that the Harry Potter series is great
I learned to read Spanish fluently largely through learning 5000+ words of vocabular with flashcards and reading the Harry Potter series. Only took 3 months counting time reading simple and dual language story books prior to starting the series.
A curious feature of that series is that she started the books at young adolescent level and was relatively short. Then as the characters grew up she increased the length and complexity of the writing.
It was fascinating to notice this.
One caution with Harry Potter though: There are a significan number of “phone Latin-like” words for magic items and spells.
Since I was learning Spanish, a romance language derived almost directly from Latin it would puzzle me at first whether a word as phony or an unknown Spanish word.
Since your native language is Polish it might or might not affect you similarly but it was not a large problem once I realized the issue.
Well, Harry Potter is on my reading bucket list on lingq, I will probably read it next after the book I’m reading right now. The only Issue with Harry Potter is lack of suitable Audiobook. Don’t know why, but every sample in any accent is just tiring after few minutes.
DRM is not a problem at all for me, you just need to go to Amazon website, Click on your content and devices, look for the book you want to read and from actions just choose Download & Transfer Via usb. Later you need to open it in Calibre and convert your book into Mobi format. There is no DRM, so program won’t block you, after that you can just put your book into lingq
I’m using audible all the time, got really good deal for 6 months. It’s only one book per month, but for most of the time I’m fine with that. Sometimes I just need additional practice, as I have Accent Reduction classes Every weekday. That’s why I’m looking for audiobooks with higher quality.
I’m Potterhead in many ways, it’s probably the first book that I ever read. I even read it in English, I have a physical copy of the book. I found it ineffective later on, but that’s another story.
I don’t have any problem to differentiate words from Latin, at least in Harry Potter series because I learned it in my native language in the first place. One problem that I see with that series is a number of British words, I want to understand them but it’s not my first priority. I’ve read 5% of the entire series on lingq already, and even if it’s only 150 pages i had to sort through vocabulary.
My passive vocabulary stays definitely beyond 5k words, I can usually understand 90-95% of spoken language when I’m watching tv Lingq is remedy for me though, I feel like I learned more by reading 2 books than after reading 10 paperbacks. This little yellow reminder, and fact that I can check the exact word in just a second helps immensely. I probably have a similar routine to you, as I’m learning English 6-8 hours every day, so I really appreciate your tips, as you’re so organized with your studies.
It’s unfortunate that the accents aren’t pleasant.
That is actually pretty surprising to me.
I don’t actually know the accents in the English versions of the audio books I mentioned since I listen in French, but I am pretty sure they will be suitable.
Right, for me the British was no issue since everything was translated to Spanish but the fake Latin took a few chapters to understand how to work with it.
As to 5000 words, you almost certainly have a much higher passive vocabulary if you can understand almost all of most TV shows.
My passive vocabulary is probably well above 50,000 and I cannot do that (yet) in French.
Though I have discovered a new technique for improving listening comprehension and ability.
This is something I’ve worked out only in the last few days so here’s a link to my first explanations:
https://www.lingq.com/en/community/forum/lingq-language-challenge-forum/goals-and-commitment-to-fluenc?post_id=278278
It’s really almost trivially simple but if you can already understand 95% of TV you may not need it or even care about it.
Search for “subvocalization” to locate the posts where it’s described. That’s basically the heart of the technique.
I thought maybe I have tried the “download and transfer via usb”, but maybe not. I’ll give that a shot. That would be awesome if it works.
Regarding Harry Potter and the accent…I suspect it’s an English accent (as in Great Britain) so if you’re looking for an American English accent, then yes that will be an issue.
Audible’s great…maybe search in the opposite direction…You can search audible under teen/young adult find a book there with a suitable accent since you can play the samples…or perhaps if you find a narrator you like, you can also filter for books done by that narrator. Then you can check Amazon for the ebook.
I remember I had tried…however, I did exactly what you said (convert to mobi) and it worked. I think the issue I was having is I had the mistaken notion that I had to explicitly try to remove the DRM and/or convert to epub (which may necessitated that removal). I tried a couple of amazon books I have and imported just fine after converting to mobi. Possibly because others have said they didn’t have much luck importing books from Amazon/Kindle and that they needed the old desktop software. One reason I may be getting around that is that I do have a kindle so maybe it is allowing it. Anyway…
Thanks so much! This definitely opens up some possibilities I didn’t think were there.