Learning
2008年12月16日
Text-to-Voice Japanese Study Aid
As an advanced Japanese speaker, I am even now frustrated at
not being able to pronounce kanji combinations that I see for the
first time. In most cases, I need to ask a native speaker or spend
time counting strokes and locating characters in my kanji dictionary -
which means in most cases that it is too troublesome, and I never
really get around to memorizing the words correctly. I notice this
most when trying to read Nikkei Shimbun articles or similar texts
that are outside my immediate area of expertise.
So I was excited to run across a very good Text-to-Speech engine
this past month when visiting the DevLearn08 conference in San Jose
where I gave a speech on international e-learning programs. The engine
is made by Neospeech, and on their website you can paste in up to
200 words of text for immediate playback. Check it out - but be sure
to choose the smooth-sounding "Misaki" for Japanese, because the
male voice named "Show" (!?) still clangs like a robot.
Now when I run across something I can't pronounce, I copy/paste a
short section of text (about a paragraph) and have Misaki-chan read it
back for me. Kind of like a personal tutor - although I have to get the
meaning from somewhere else. I have tested it with difficult place names,
technical terms, katakana catchphrases, etc. and my Japanese
colleagues also confirm that it passes with flying colors. Give it a try!
They also have English (which seems fair enough - but my ear for that is
probably more critical), Korean, Chinese, and Spanish on the site as
well. If anyone can provide any input, I would be interested to know
whether the accents are natural for those languages as well.
For those out there that want to hear recent news in English, I suggest
you check out the website of my daily newspaper the International
Herald Tribune (IHT). There you can automatically play the audio for
any article right there on the site - although again to my ear the English
is a bit stilted...
2008年12月06日
Louis Vuitton in Paris
One of my favorite pictures that I use in my
seminars is this one. I took it on the Champs-
Elysees in Paris in the spring of 2004. I use it
to illustrate the understanding of what a brand
is and why some companies like LV - by driving this understanding
throughout their organization, even to the level of using creative
materials like this to cover a shop renovation in progress - are
able to generate such amazing gross profit on their products.
I can't claim to know for sure that this was the first construction site in
the world to "brand" their coveralls in such a way, but I do know that
in Tokyo this kind of site design started showing up only in the 2005-
2006 timeframe. And still now, most of the sites here still use just big
blue sheets with 安全第一 and the JV partner names emblazoned
on them.
Think about the creative spark here - what a billboard! And while I
was there on a slow Tuesday, I was surrounded by about 30 tourists
standing around me taking the same shot - from their conversations I
could hear that they came from Korea, China, Eastern Europe, South
America - all over the world. Now that's brand communication!