German Audio Lessons
Fatima Teem
Similar to Radio D, DeutschAkademie teaches you language through a story (yet again with a character named Philip!). You will follow Philip as he arrives in Germany and has many real-world conversations you yourself will have if you visit. You can listen on your computer or an iOS or Android device.
FluentU is an excellent resource for listening practice with a video component. It teaches you the language through short clips from authentic German media including movie trailers, scenes from TV shows and news segments.
Each video comes with a transcript and interactive subtitles available in both German and English. You can hover over or click on any word in the subtitles to see its translation, part of speech and more.
The German Professor has videos that cover grammar topics suitable for German beginners, as well as some more advanced lessons. For some quick audio study, put on the 5 Minute German playlist.
GermanPod101 offers hundreds of audio and video German lessons, catering to all skill levels from newbie to fluent. They come complete with interactive features like vocabulary tools, SRS flashcards, transcripts, bustling community forums and a handy app.
The goal of this podcast is to teach you German you can use in real-life conversations. Each podcast episode offers a lesson on a different theme, some teaching specific German expressions and others teaching conversational skills like how to introduce yourself.
You can download the audio German lessons to your phone, MP3 player or computer, and they even come with PDF lesson guides if you want to sit down for some focused, active listening practice.
Schweiser Radio provides a gigantic list of podcasts for you to choose from, and the best part is that you can listen to most of them directly from your computer. I like grabbing the feed and inserting it into my podcasting phone app, so everything is in one place.
How about German audio learning that feels like a newspaper? Listening to Deutschlandfunk is like checking out USA Today or The Huffington Post. Deutschlandfunk covers politics, sports, culture, the economy and more.
German audiobooks allow you to immerse yourself in a world of fantasy, science fiction or romance, all with the help of an MP3 player and headphones. Consider listening to your favorite books in German to learn something new.
I enjoy compiling my own playlists, since services like Spotify and Pandora can be a little scattered. However, the greatest part of these services is that you can search for other playlists that people have created and shared online.
Start with the German Pop Spotify playlist, which is from the popular Goethe Institute, a place for German online and offline learning. This playlist includes favorites from artists like Clueso, LOT, Madsen and Ferris Mc.
This German Folk Music album is obviously a little different from the pop extravaganza you listened to above. This playlist is for the purists. Those who want to hear what people were listening to hundreds of years ago in Germany.
You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used. If you see an interesting word you don't know, you can add it to a vocabulary list.
And FluentU isn't just for watching videos. It's a complete platform for learning. It's designed to effectively teach you all the vocabulary from any video. Swipe left or right to see more examples of the word you're on.
Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
After performing a training with 100k steps and 14306 recorded phrases I found that the quality was not as desired. Dominik (@dkreutz) and Eltonico from the Mycroft Forum were kind enough to check the quality of my recordings. It turned out that some recordings had reverberation and echoes and therefore not ideal for TTS training.
Together with Dominik I try to identify and optimize the bad files. When that is complete, I will provide the link to the cleaned and optimized dataset here.
Many thanks to Dominik and Eltocino for their support in this matter.
After chatting with @dkreutz he recommended to document the progress and lessons learned for the community. As i think this is a good idea i (and probable Dominik) will update this thread on a regular basis.
Do these values (12000 and 1100) come from this dataset -Speech-Dataset/ which consists off 13.100 audio clips.
So would these values on a 10.000 clips ljspeech dataset mean 8.900 (train) and 1.100 (validate) or on which calculation depend these values?
To get the embeddings, have a look at compute_embeddings.py (reading it again now, this could be a little clearer in the instructions ). You basically point it at your audio files and it creates a whole load of .npy files that are then used by the notebook.
What this version in TTS does is use the pretrained model Eren created along with the interactive plotting where you can listen to the audio by clicking on the chart (thus easily attempt to discover what connects the clusters)
Dear Neil,
I wonder if you could be as helpful for italian language as you have been here for german.
I am trying to replicate steps suggested,
so I downloaded LibriTTS 100 version (english) - OK
So, at the end, can you help in clarifying this inconsistency?
Or am I messing up things between TTS/ speaker_encoder github instructions
and and those in the wiki at -Encoder
being a newcomer here?
Thanks, sorry for the inconvenience.
As posted elsewhere I am trying to setup a first italian language attempt starting from the voices collectd in the Mozilla Common Voice Project.
As far as I read around here due to the amount of different voices and difference in quality, we should not have too high expectations,
Then I would also start a single italian voice attempt.
thanks again
sergio
Then run compute_embeddings.py, passing the relevant arguments (so the use_cuda parameter and then the model you downloaded above (as per @sanjaesc), the config and the paths. This works through your audio files and produces the .npy files I mentioned above.
Rocket German has a sizeable commission scheme in place that attracts a lot of disingenuous profiteers. They spam people with links to Rocket German which has (in my opinion) caused major damage to the reputation of the company.
NOTE: There was a fourth section with an in-built flashcard app where you could add vocab and expressions from anywhere in the course to be studied later on. There is currently a better version of this under development and due for release soon.
The interface is simple and clutter-free; you have dialogues and expressions, download links for audio and lesson notes, and all lessons are followed up with exercises to test you (writing, pronunciation and listening comprehension).
Other programs like Rosetta Stone had for quite some time employed a fairly accurate form of automatic voice recognition for pronunciation checking. This was one of the few features that made RS as popular as it is.
But overall the comprehensive scope of its content (a whopping 190 lessons), 100% natural German dialogue, an outstanding mobile app, Google Web Speech technology and other excellent features make it well worth the price.
There are two main requirements for learning German, or any language, and making it stick: consistency and immersion. Audiobooks are great for consistency because you can easily make them a daily habit. And needless to say, audio is also great for immersing yourself in a language. With a German audiobook in your ears, you can just let the vocabulary, grammar, and cadence wash over you. While you might not pick it all up right away, the immersive nature of audiobooks makes the information easier to recall and remember than, say, simply flipping through a textbook.
The Pimsleur Method might be the perfect way to introduce beginners to the German language. Each lesson in the Pimsleur Method provides 30 minutes of German spoken language practice. Each of these lessons introduces new vocabulary and sentence structures, and each lesson builds on the previous one. Pimsleur German Level 1 is broken up into 30 lessons across six different audiobooks. The narration across the Pimsleur audiobooks is clear and easy to follow, which makes learning the German phrases a breeze.
If you loved the Pimsleur method when you were just beginning your German language journey, why not return to what worked, now that you're more experienced? Pimsleur German Level 2 offers 30 more 30-minute lessons, broken up across six more audiobooks.
If you enjoyed German Short Stories for Beginners, it's time to level up now that you're an advanced German student! This audiobook includes 10 more captivating short stories read by native German speakers. The stories involve real-life relatable situations so that you can learn the vocabulary and phrases and use them in your everyday life. The most exciting part about listening to these stories? Now that you've been studying German, you'll notice that you can understand the stories with minimal effort and really enjoy listening!
Loving learning more German through storytelling? Check out Mord am Morgen, a fun and engaging detective story for advanced German learners. Follow the story of Kommissar Baumgartner and Kommissarin Momsen as they solve a small town murder mystery and banter with one another in German along the way. This audiobook is narrated in a conversational style, at the speed that native German speakers generally speak, but spoken clearly for German learners to understand.
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