On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 07:15:03PM +0200, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > > I have to ask also, is the audio quality that comes out the speakers (in > > general) good enough to learn the proper sounds? Every device I have > > seems to have wildly varying qualities and characteristics. > > For example, (OK, not OpenBSD but somewhat relevant) if I wanted to > > listen to the speech coming out of Google Translate, would a native > > speaker of say Spanish, German or Russian consider the sounds "proper"? > > What a bizarre question. Listen to English dialog from your speaker > setup. Does it sound like "proper" English? Anything that plays > music in reasonable quality--so *anything*, really--will more than > do for human speech.
Actually, despite seeming like a bizarre question, which seems to be true, it is not. One of the more difficult parts of learning to speak and hear a new language consists of adding the new neural pathways to actually be able to stop translating the new languages sounds into the closest English sounds. As we originally learn a language, our brains develop the ability to "only" be able to hear the native sounds of that language only. Our brains, etc. conveniently move what we hear or speak to the closest English sounds. This prevents us from hearing the new speech sounds at first until we train our brain to hear and make the brand new sounds. So asking only a native speaker if the sounds are proper or not is the only way to really be sure. Although I can vouch for quality in English, I simply do not, yet, have the ability to judge new sounds. Only a native speaker of that language can do this task. IMHO, I do think this is a reasonable question to ask. There are some languages with some very unusual sounds. As far as music, I can definitely hear that European played classical music tends to sound better than American played (Same piece). I have no idea what is different, but I can hear it. Chris Bennett
