Practising French pronunciation on the go; experimenting with a Bluetooth phone controller ring
| frenchI want to practice French pronunciation while I'm walking around or biking in a relatively safe place. Having done the work to extract the tongue twisters and expressions from my recordings, it was pretty easy to use some Emacs Lisp, subed-record, and compile-media to create individual audio files that I could play in shuffle mode. Each file has ten repetitions of a chime, the tongue twister, and enough silence so that I can repeat the phrase. The chime makes it possible for me to say the phrase in unison with the sample, or I can wait until the silent part in order to see how much I remember.
To make that, I use subed-record-extract-last-phrases to create a VTT file, edit it to adjust the timestamps (sample file), use subed-record-compile-video to create the clip compilation (example video), and then use sacha-learn-lang-make-tonguetwister-practice-files to create the clips. Here's an example of one tonguetwister repeated 10 times:
I wanted to experiment with getting a scrolling ring so that I could advance to the next track or go back to a previous track without tapping my phone. I think this will be useful if I've stashed my phone or if it's cold enough outside that I want to keep my hands in my pockets or in my mittens. It could also be useful for taking group selfies, as I find it difficult to both hold the phone and tap the camera button. So I chose one with a scroll wheel and a left and right button. (AliExpress)
I have small hands, and the ring is completely loose on my finger. It rotates at the slightest provocation, although it does stay put when my hand is curled, which means I can still use it. Winter is coming and I will probably wear thin gloves soon anyway.
Pairing it with my Android device over Bluetooth was pretty straightforward once I figured out which device it was. It didn't work with the VLC media player that I usually use for playing audio. I turned on developer options to figure out what it was sending. It turns out that single-clicking left or right simulates screen swipes instead of sending keyboard events. VLC doesn't support gesture navigation, so I switched to Lotus Media Player instead. Switching to the next and previous track in Lotus worked fine, although since single clicks simulate swipes, the screen has to be on, the application needs to be in the foreground, and Lotus needs to be in the track view mode instead of in the playlist. So it takes a little bit of setting up, but it seems to work fine. That means I can use it to skip tongue twisters I'm already comfortable with.
Double clicking right or left worked more reliably for going to the next or previous track in Lotus, even with the screen off or even when I was in a different application. Bonus: I was able to use the sidecar lyrics directory option in the Lotus Media Player configuration to get it to display the text that I associated with the file using ffmpeg and -metadata lyrics-fra=Text.... The ring also works with YouTube.
Clicking the scroll wheel does actually take a picture as advertised. The scroll is a bit too aggressive for browsing webpages, but I probably wouldn't use it for that anyway.
Listening to these repetitions of tongue twisters gives me a good mental workout because it's hard to remember the sentences when I'm not reading the text in front of me. I feel myself getting better at mentally chunking them. As I hear them and try to say them again, I remember the things that my teacher pointed out to me. It lets me find more opportunities to practice oral expression throughout the day. I'm looking forward to seeing how this experiment with this new input device will go.