Input, Input, Input

There are many different paths to learning a language. Today it seems like the number of tools that you can use to start your journey are almost countless. Regardless of the process you use, you will eventually come across the concept of comprehensible input.

Here is a great article by Steve Kauffman about comprehensible input - what is it and how does it work.  Basically it's finding the right content that let's you understand almost all of what you are listening to and building those listening skills.  As your understanding grows you will be able to figure out new words when you run across them.  

The key thing to understand is that it needs to be content that you can understand.  If you are listening to some content and you can't understand any of it, the process becomes frustrating and a chore.  Pretty soon you will dread the exercise and eventually you will just stop.  It has to be fun for you to continue and more importantly for you to want to do it.

So how can you find comprehensible input if you're just starting out?

Guess what. Scribelate has you covered.  

There are all kinds of podcasts for you to listen to that are at the beginner level.  I am currently learning Japanese so let me use that as an example. A quick google on Japanese Beginner Podcasts gives us good list of podcasts to try.  I have a bit of a love hate relationship with the "Pod101" podcasts but if you're starting from nothing they do a good job so let's pull in one of their episodes to Scribleate.

When you first login you'll see a screen showing you your projects:

Click on the '+' icon:

Enter "JapanesePod101" and click the search button:

Select any of the episodes you find interesting although I recommend just selecting one or two - it can get overwhelming if you have a lot of episodes to work with.

Okay, go back to your project page and select the headphones icon and it will take you to the project page:

Finally, we're ready to do some Scibelating.  The first thing we want to do is create a segment to transcribe.  JapanesePod101 episodes are always short.  However I have found a 30 second clip is way better.

Now JapanesePod101 episodes are a learning podcast so it's mixed content between english and japanese.  So there is some english and some Japanese - this makes it hard to focus just on Japanese.  Scribelate steps in and let's you create segments so let's listen to the podcast and find a good segment to work with.

I went through the whole 15 minutes and found 8 different segments that are easy to work with.  They are super short segments less that 10 seconds, and are just small snippets of the lesson. Here is what Scribelate looks like now:

Now that we have a segment selected we can click on the transcribe button to get the transcribe tools:

The first transcription is super small - this lesson is about asking how much something is so this is what I transcribed: korewa ikura desuka? Ni hyaku yen desu

That doesn't look very Japanese though does it?  If you are learning japanese you probably have figured out how to type in Japanese but it is kind of hard so if you want you can get the Japanese text by clicking on autotranscribe and just just that segment will be converted to text for you:

これはいくらですか 200円です

This text breaks down to this:

"This is how much?": korewa ikura desuka?: これはいくらですか

"200 yen it is": Ni hyaku yen desu: 200円です

The screen shots here are early versions of Scribelate so it may look very different to you now.  I hope this showed how Scribelate helps you narrow down your focus into areas where your focus is needed.