Strategy with the conversations

Any tips for how to best use the conversations. Other than of course to listen to them. I was thinking listen first, then read the transcription, then listen again. Then move on to the next one. What do you think?

Good question. If you ask 10 people, you'll probably get 10 different techniques, haha. I like to listen to them all the way through, read all the way through, then listen again. Sounds similar to your method. When I read them, I always read out loud. You?

If I feel like working on my pronunciation, I will read a sentence, listen to the audio, and repeat if I was off. Sometimes I'll work through the whole passage doing that - I used to do it a lot with French, which has really confusing orthography (to me). But I haven't done it for a while.

Thanks for the reply. I don't read anything aloud, because I've been doing input only. I've felt like if I can't understand the language, what's the point of speaking. Probably not a smart approach, but what can I say. It's a great idea though and I think I will start doing it relatively soon. 

Could also probably use the ol' audacity split and export to anki trick. The Spanish accents in the LT convos are good because most websites use Colombian, Mexican, or Northern Spain-Spanish (Castilian), and the LT convos use something vaguely Caribbean or costal central/south american. Good listening practice me thinks and worth cutting up. I'm not quite to the level of using the Chinese conversations yet but maybe in a few months after I bang out 3k hanzi I plan on doing the same. http://www.workaudiobook.com/ might also be a useful tool for listening practice on the conversations :)! 

Tom.Busch wrote:

I don't read anything aloud, because I've been doing input only.

I always encourage people to learn orthography and pronunciation together before they do anything else to capture their full potential in pronunciation. Reading before being able to pronounce correctly can fossilize errors, because even though you may not realize it, you are assigning pronunciation to words that may not be correct. Reading out loud is a great way to counter this; if you check your pronunciation, you are essentially preventing yourself from "cheating". And even after you get fairly good at pronunciation, reading out loud safeguards us from getting sloppy and subconsciously assigning incorrect sounds to words.

I would recommend you to make some friends who speak native language that you're targeting. 

In my case, when I was learning English, I was able to read and write well enough, but speaking was always my problem to solve.

I decided to make some American friends who I could speak English with.

Guess what! my English skill got rapidly improved, and my friends were even surprised and impressed with it.

In this case, again, I would recommend you to speak your targeting language to people to have some practices :)