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What happened to the French male voice?
I find the French female voice hard to understand in the audio only exercises, and I hope the male voice will be restored.
17 Comments
It's good to listen different accents, different "people", for your comprehension skill. Even though the voice is electronically generated.
It probably will not. The male voice was very problematic. It had bad pronunciation, accent, etc. It was finally deleted for all its problems.
Was it bad or was it non-standard? I always thought it sounded more like the south of France, where the speech is slower and there's a breath more pronunciation of consonants. From what I understood from my high school French teacher, the Parisian dialect, faster and more clipped, became more of a standard of sophistication and is considered more proper. I am not French so I can't say, but I thought the male speaker sounded more southern and less langues d'oïl. I liked the variety (if it's not considered bad but only unsophisticated) because it's not as if the two voices didn't wind up eventually pronouncing the same words through the course.
Both voices are/were pretty standard. Concerning quality, I remember that the female voice had some issues that the male voice had not, but overall there were maybe more problems with the male one.
Thanks. I used the male voice to catch some of the sounds missing from the ends of sentences with the female voice, then I leaned my repetition/pronunciation towards the female voice. I'm lucky to have had four years of French in high school to fall back on, but the female voice threw me back to the "OMG, OMG" feeling I always used to get when we did "dictation" in class. The "oh, man, this is not spelled like it's pronounced" panic.
To be honest you shouldn't really rely on any of those text-to-speech voice bots.
Considering the relatively small amount of sentences in a course I think they could afford to hire a professional to do the voice-over for the complete sentences (if not for every word) at least for the most popular languages (Spanish and French).
However they did it for the Labs Stories in Spanish, so if this feature extends to French we can expect real people to do the voice-over.
I agree. I checked at a number of sites to refresh my memory from school for French, but for German I got a minimal Pimsleur--not even the first full set--just to get down the pronunciation. I just wasn't picking it up properly from the computer-generated samples here.
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I know the male voice had some problems, but he was distinct and easy to understand. Bring him back.
