Have you guys ever used a newspaper or magazine article as content? If so, has anybody ever used the Google text to speech function in the translator to read out the whole article, then record that using, say, Audacity, then convert to mp3 to load onto you MP3 player? Any experiences with this?
Dean.
I would only use articles which don’t come with audio as supplementary reading material. If you want to practice listening, it is far better to find content with audio and transcript, such as news shows with subtitles or a transcript you can find somewhere.
The thing about text to speech is that while they have really good human voices for individual words, the overall human quality is lost in full sentences, not to mention entire articles. It may be good to hear the individual words spoken in context, but for that purpose there are far better resources with human speech.
So I’d just use articles as an extra reading activity. If I want to practice listening to audio, I’ll stick to true human speech, because I’m not just trying to hear individual words, but indeed full sentence rhythms and emotion which is lost in text to speech tools.