Does anyone else do this ?
I have recently been reading 三重门 by 韩寒 (yes, laugh away), and find myself cutting and pasting pages into google translate and reading and then listening to it. I find this helps a lot.
Anyone else have experience here? Are there other similar methods?
I converted a few texts to mp3 using the mac’s text to speech function, just to test it out. I certainly prefer native speakers.
It’s a very nice idea. For English I use Talk it! and for other languages the Easy Words demos but I hadn’t thought about google translate for that purpose. Thanks for the tip.
I think, for Chinese at least, this seems to work ok for a couple of reasons:
1- relatively few syllables in Chinese (around 1300) so google seems to have created a complete voiced vocab set that is pretty standard pronunciation (but not perfect)
2- it now seems to have pretty good sentence intonation built into it (ie the voice slows down and pauses around commas, full stops etc).