Help with speed of listening exercises

[olive-keane]

Not sure how or where to post this. I am following the second lot of SSIW lessons. When i try to listen to the listening exercises ( NOT the lesson part) it sounds like chipmonks. I have tried to slow it to half speed and even quartrer but the sound just gets distorted…anyone else have this problem?

[siaronjames]

It’s not a problem, it’s actually intentional.
These threads will help explain why

Listening exercises slower speed

I have tried to listen to all the listening exercises in the initial challenge series but all I get is a ‘chipmonk-like’ sound: the speech is ultra-fast and indecipherable. Can anyone tell me whether they have experienced the same thing and whether there is a way of slowing down the file please?

Speed of listening exercises

The speaking speed of the speaker on the listening exercises is so fast I can’t follow a word. It’s like a record being played at ten times the normal speed. Has anyone else found this problem. If so, is it a fault on the download

Double speed listening exercises

Hello everyone, Just a question about the listening exercises. Should I understand every word before moving onto the new one? I’m finding double speed tricky. I know it is going an important part of learning a language though! Many thanks Rhian

Listening Exercises Getting Easier

Shwmae bawb! I am currently doing the 6 month speaker course and am on Level 2 Lesson 3. Yesterday I listened to the listening exercises from Level 1, from Exercise 5 through to Exercise 2. Now, I’m not sure if it just me or is it possible that my brain is processing the double speed listening exercises as normal speed? For instance Exercise 5 was a bit of blur but by Exercise 3 came around (around 10 minutes of concentrated listening) I could follow the conversation back and forth with relati…

[Deborah-SSi]

This is what it says if you access the lessons through the website:

The Listening Practices from the second one on are recorded at double speed. There is a specific learning technique behind this which gives you an advantage when you get into normal speed Welsh conversations.

The idea is not to try and understand them. Just let them waft over you as if you’re listening to some pleasant background music - not concentrating too hard, but not thinking about something else either. That’s all you need to do, and trust your subconscious to do the learning for you. With repeated sessions like that, you’ll find yourself gradually able to pick words and understand chunks as your brain speeds up its processing to match the recording, but you’ll be understanding them in Welsh, with no translating into English.

It’s like when you first drive onto a motorway and it seems fast, but after a while everything just feels like normal speed and it’s really slow when you come off again. You’ll have a similar experience with this. Once you get used to the double speed ones, if you listen to the first one which is normal speed, you’ll find it really slow!

Persevere and you’ll reap the benefits. It’s the fastest shortcut to understanding natural spoken Welsh.

But if you access everything just through the mobile app, you don’t see that explanation.

[tim-harris]

What I have found is that these high-speed listening exercises are very useful for learning to feel the rhythms of Welsh, and the contours of the phrasing, even if you do not ‘get’ every word. And I think that is extremely important, since the rhythms of Welsh are so different from English - partly because accents are not so strong as in English, and partly because virtually every vowel is pronounced clearly. There is no ‘schwa’, as in English.