2

are there any nice web sites for practicing dictation in Japanese?

I imagine sites where: Sound of short Japanese conversation or a link to such material is uploaded, each participating learner listens to it, write it down literally, and puts the result into the site, then the participants compare and discuss their results, and repeat this activity regularly -- weekly or twice a week -- free of charge.

Background: I help foreign people learn Japanese once a week in Japan. Some of them find difficulty in listening even though they live in Japan. I'd like to recommend nice sites for them to improve listening comprehension by practicing dictation a few times between classes. I searched Google but couldn't find this kind of sites.

I will appreciate your help.

2
  • @Silvermaple: Was it you that recently recommended a site where short essays could be read and played at the speed you want? I could not find it on the chat page but it might be useful for people looking to practice dictation (even tho it does not have all the interactive facilities OP seems to be looking for).
    – Tim
    Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 5:25
  • @Tim Oh, indeed! I'll make an answer!
    – silvermaple
    Commented Mar 11, 2014 at 16:35

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

News in Slow Japanese is a site where they have news articles that are read by native speakers and have the transcriptions available for each article. You can choose at what speed you want it read, and what kind of transcription you want. The speeds are fast and slow, but the fast option is still very clearly enunciated and slower then native speed. There are three options for the transcription, one in regular Japanese (i.e. kanji/kana), another in Japanese with vocabulary mouse-overs, and another with romaji.

1

I didn't see any site of that sort. Dictation materials of high quality are expensive, and making transcriptions is time-consuming.

In China, I use aboboo. It provide tools to help dictate and mark your result. There are plenty of resources for different languages available. (Most of them are from broadcast and textbooks. In fact, they should be copyrighted though) You can also adjust the playback speed if you feel the material is too hard or to easy. You can also make you only material.

The problem is, it has only a Chinese user interface. I found a English page, but it doesn't look like the original software, and I haven't tried it out.

Another thing I would like to highly recommend is the NHK news, I found the text is often almost the same as the audio and can be used instead of transcription, e.g. this one. I tried this when I began learning Japanese and I felt the pronunciation is very clear and the speech speed is not fast at all for a beginner.

By the way, although dictation is very popular in China, and does prove to be effective, but it's very inefficient. Listen and repeat/paraphrase usually performs better.

You must log in to answer this question.