Any stereo audio learning resources for other languages?

[berkeman]

I had an interesting thought tonight, but my Google-foo is failing me so far. I learned Spanish as a second language in high school, and have lost most of that skill over the years. I learned a fair bit of Japanese as an Army bratt stationed in Yokohama in the late 1960s with my family, but have also lost most of that ability to understand and speak Japanese.

I would like to refresh on one of those languages or perhaps another language, but the traditional learning paths don't appeal to me. I think that I could benefit a lot from a teaching modality where stereo audio was used, along with the brain's ability to process two parallel audio streams from the left and right ears at the same time.

We use the stereo processing ability extensively in emergency communication situations (in EMS, Fire, HAM radio, etc.), where you listen to two different channels at the same time with stereo headphones and have to mentally separate them. It seems like if I were hearing Spanish in one ear and the simultaneous English translation in the other ear, that would help a lot to facilitate my re-learning of the language. There would be some subtleties to making the presentation optimum for the stereo learning experience (switching back and forth between commentary about grammar issues and the actual conversational examples), but it seems like if you started with the model of simultaneous stereo audio, there could be a lot of learning leverage with that language learning paradigm.

And I'm well aware that language translation of conversational sentences is not word-for-word, so of course there would be some desynchronization as sentences were played in stereo in both ears (adjectives versus noun positions in sentences in Spanish, for example), but I don't think that would be much of an issue once you got used to the presentation.

Has anyone seen this type of learning presentation/modality before? If so, I'd like to give it a try. If not, I guess I need to get a lot better at either Spanish or Japanese, and try to put together a trial version...

 

[jedishrfu]

Well there’s the Rosetta Stone learning system. It’s fast paced works well fo European languages but not as well for Asian languages. They apparently tried to shoehorn Asian languages into the euro model.

I’ve not used RosettaStone myself. I let my wife do the talking as many husbands do but I digress.

Ite an interesting idea. I wonder if the multi channels of a dvd movie could be accessed at the same time to do the left right ear trick you mentioned.

 

[skeptic2]

I learned Spanish while living in Chicago. I did it by attending evening conversational Spanish classes at a local community college and by listening only to Spanish language radio and television stations for over a year. The Spanish classes allowed me to ask and get answers to questions about things I couldn't understand about Spanish. Listening to Spanish language stations helped me develop an ear for Spanish words so I could distinguish words in sentences as opposed to hearing a string of unconnected syllables.