04 August 2008

Fierce Pronuncation

Does anyone else think that the woman reading the vocabulary words and pronunciation examples in the first chapter of Learning Irish sounds...angry? Perhaps homicidally so?

The male voice a little bit later in the vocabulary and texts sounds much more natural, but at least one of the female readers (there may be only one I haven't gotten past more than the first few chapters before) sounds very forced and very abrupt. I think she's trying to over-enunciate and over-articulate and it sounds kind of scary!

That first jolt of her pronouncing buí takes me aback every time. Eesh, lady. Relax. We're just trying to learn the language here! I feel like I'm being yelled at most of the time.

One of the things that I did early on, though, was to transfer the CDs to my computer and then listen to them in Windows Media Player at about half speed a few times. I normally eschew the media player, but my preferred player (from Real) doesn't do the 'slow it down but keep the same pitch' thing that the windows version does. And, I discovered that my iPod won't slow down normal mp3s! It will play things 'slower' and 'faster' for audiobooks, which are mp4? raa? but for regular mp3s, you're stuck. Unless -- as geeky me may do -- you translate them into the audiobook format, or record them anew at the new slower speed.

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