Project description

What is Steno

Steno is an application that helps people learning a foreign language to train listening skills.

What is the listening comprehension

The listening comprehension is an essential part of the language learning and an important skill for every person who learn a foreign language. It’s the ability to perceive the speech in the studied language aurally.

How to get this skill and how Steno may help

Like most other skills, this can be got only by exercising regularly. We should listen to pronunciation of different people in order to gain experience, which we’ll use subsequently.

The learning will be more effectively, especially at the beginning, if we’ll listen to the legible pronunciation. Also, I think many will agree with me, the training will be regularly and effective if it’ll be enjoyable and interesting. Therefore one of the possible ways to arrange the learning process may be the watching of your favorite movies, clips, TV programs in the foreign language.

But the usual viewing of movies isn’t helpful enough, because you often encounter with unfamiliar words, expressions, slang, and similar difficulties. Of course, you’ll quickly get tired of stopping playback after each missed word in order to find it in a dictionary. Besides, we quickly cease to be attentive to the particular details of the pronunciation, when we’re intereseted, because the context allows us to understand the meaning of words spoken, despite the fact that we’ve missed any nuances. Thus, the learning will rapidly turn into a waste of time which will not be useful enough for the skill enhancement.

Steno can make this process more resultative. To start the learning you’ll need to choose a movie in the language that you’re learning and subtitles in the same language. Then you should to watch the movie and type everything characters say into an appropriate field of the application window. This creates the necessary motivation for you in order to try to hear the pronunciation in all details. This is what allows to enhance your skill faster than if you had just watched the same movie.

The application pauses the playback after each sentence and continues to play, when you typed the last word of this sentence. Steno provides the ability to repeat the last sentence as many times as you wish. You can use hints if necessary. Besides, a translation of a word and sentence appears on the screen after the typing in order to help you find out the meaning of unfamiliar words immediately, not being distracted by a dictionary.

Of course, interruptions of the playback and the attentive listening of the pronunciation might reduce a pleasure from watching a movie, but this minor inconvenience helps you to benefit from the time spent on an entertainment. Probably, you won’t watch a new movie in this rhythm, but it’s a good reason to re-watch your favorite movies.

Screenshots

Windows

Windows 7

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Windows XP

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Linux

Ubuntu

GTK decorated by Unity.

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Debian

GTK decorated by Gnome.

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Gentoo

GTK without decorations.

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