Re: VoA (Voice of America) and Microsoft Media Player (Re: Use Microsoft's TTS to learn English and other languages)

On Feb 7, 6:42 am, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 7, 12:01 am, comcdp <semi...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You see the text-to-speech function is very useful for us in many
ways, learning languages, relaxing yourself while listening and more.

Nowadays learning a language is so much easier. :)

The tool is also known asMicrosoftNarrator, and can be found at
Start button --> Accessories --> Ease of Access --> Narrator.

It's fun for the first 5 minutes. Afterwards it becomes really
annoying. Ha. :)

(When I got my Vista, I also played with Speech Recognition. I turned
it off after 5 minutes, too. It's really cumbersome and annoying.)

-----

I agree that the most needed learning resource for adults is some
material with both audio AND text.

I find that Internet Radios are really great for learning some
languages. Specifically for English, VoA (Voice of America) has done a
great job of providing some transcripts. (Not that I need tolearn
English! I used VoA tolearnVietnamese, ha ha.)

http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/index.cfm

It contains an audio-and-transcript archive for many articles. VoA
also has some more dedicated English-learning programs in some other
languages.

On top of that,Microsoft'snewer Media Player allows you to slow down
the play speed (under View --> Enhancements --> Play Speed Settings.)
TRUST ME, IT'S THE GREATEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD! It's not some
new invention nor anything like that, but for people learning foreign
languages, it all of a sudden makes your life so much easier.

With all that, learning English becomes a snap. :)

Then you have many on-line bilingual dictionaries. And for some
languages (like Vietnamese) It used to be that some site have plug-ins
that can automatically do bilingual translation for words that you
right-click on your browser. (Though I've only seen it work once. I
haven't been able to make it work when I last tried it.)

-- Ekki

Good article, Thanks!

My machine have Windows XP installed, so the Narrator is unvailable,
but I got panopreter, it works fine too.
.

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