My Videos

Hi everybody. I want to start sharing some videos with you, because I think it will really help me. To start out with, I'm going to show you my first Russian video. It's pretty bad, but that leaves lots of room for improvement.

Ok, here's a short video with my Thai friend Nang:

I just added english subtitles, but you'll have to open this in youtube to turn them on.

noo 555

She probably thought you were talking about her for a second.

ah - good point. That didn't even occur to me. I included this in the subtitles.

Ok, I talked to some university students from China tonight. I told them I just wanted to test my camera, trying to improve the video quality. But the conversation came out nice enough to keep.

This has been a real learning experience for me. I have a Mac, which is part of the difficulty. First, getting a video on YouTube wasn't very easy. The first video I made was a 30+ min mov file made with call recorder on Skype. When I tried to upload it to YouTube, it said I needed to wait 800 hours, and that I might be better off converting it to a format they support. I came to find out YouTube doesn't support mov, and call recorder only created mov files, so I went looking for a way to convert it to mp4. I tried a free tool to do this, but it didn't work. Instead, it installed a bunch of adware in my browser. So I spent about an hour figuring out how to remove the adware. I found another free tool, MPEG Streamclip, which received a few recommendations on a forum 5 years ago. It took a while to figure out, but it worked. I went to upload the mp4 into youtube, and it worked, but YouTube wouldn't let me publish it unless I got verified, because the video was over 30 min long. After I verified, I was finally able to publish.

Second, today I added subtitles to the shortest video. I started out setting up a really handy tool recommended by many, Captiontube. In a nutshell, it didn't work. So I tried YouTube's own subtitle creator, and it was terrible. It's supposed to figure out when there is talking, and distribute the text evenly over those parts, but it doesn't match at all. Then I went to a another highly recommended program, and it wouldn't accept my youtube video. A third tool also didn't work. Finally, I found Dotsub. It's a free site for subtitle creation, and it worked well. My only complaint was that the timestamp was “CMD + SHIFT + ↑” for the beginning of a caption followed by “CMD + SHIFT + ↓” for the end of a caption. I think coders are pretty good at these shortcuts, but to me it seemed too complicated. One of the programs that didn't work simply used "a" for both beginning and end, which would have been a lot friendlier. So I just keyed in the numbers instead, and it wasn't so bad. But even if the shortcuts weren't so weird, I have to say subtitling is very time consuming. Of course, the PC thing to say today is that everybody should create subtitles for all their videos, but the truth is this is a pretty big task. I will reserve subtitling for special videos, because I'm a slow typist. All I created was English subtitles, but I plan to have subtitles in L1 & L2 for videos that I choose to make subtitles for in the future.

I hope you enjoy this Japanese video:

Talking to my friend Yan in China:

Found another really good Russian tutor:

Talked to my friend Mui from Thailand:

I need Spanish and French. I've been lazy about getting those up. I made a French video, but the teacher intentionally talked really slow, so I have no desire to post that. I should have complained, but I think she was a slow talker (her husband is deaf), and I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

I'd forgotten there were internet problems too, but I found a 6 min piece that wasn't too bad. Enjoy

That was actually a paid teacher from italki. My favorite place to find free exchanges is Shared Talk, because the people are actually present and online, ready to migrate to Skype, which means I can have an instant conversation any time I want. Well, that's the theory. I often have to wait for people from my target language to show up. But it's still much faster than sending emails and then waiting.

You bet! Let us know how it goes.