Talk is Golden by KanTalk.com

We’ve just released another cool feature—video transcribing. It’s very easy to use.

You watched an interesting video at YouTube, liked it, but not sure you completely understood it. Well, copy the URL of that video clip, submit it at KanTalk, and transcribe what you’ve heard. Other users can watch it, give you feedback, or offer their transcript to the same video. Then you will know exactly what’s being said in the video.

Transcribing something is an excellent way to improve your listening comprehension. It does a magic to your ears. Try one and you will see what I mean. And you won’t be guilty anymore for spending too much time at YouTube.

Let us know how you like it and what we can improve further.

David and Danielle

It used to be quite tedious to record your self-introduction at Kantalk. You need to download a piece of software and install it first, run it to record, save the audio file to a local folder, and then upload it to your Profile. For anyone who’s less nerdy than Bill Gates, it’s a daunting task. Some of you must have given up somewhere along the way.

Now, it is a piece of cake. Since we released the Recording tool two weeks ago, it only takes a few button-clicking to record your voice at Kantalk. Many of you have done it already with “Please call Stella”. It’s easy and fun. So we made the same tool available to record you self-introduction. We also added the “Delete” function; in case you don’t like what you hear—either self-intro or “Please call Stella”, simply delete it.

So, please introduce yourself, with the clicking of two buttons: Record and Stop. Done

In our latest release (Beta now), we added a cool feature that allows you to record a text and play it at the site. It’s easy to use; no need to download or install anything. Just click a few buttons, and you will be listening to your voice in no time.

How can this feature help your language learning? Well, in many ways. But to start with, to evaluate your accent and pronunciation. Many of our users are quite conscious of their accent and want to improve it. How good or bad is yours? Want to get some feedback from others?

At Record page, you can record a short paragraph, developed by a linguistic professor to study accent. It consists of common words, but contains all English sounds. Read it out loud and record it. Other users then can play your recording and rate it, or offer you feedback. It’s fun. Later on, we’ll add more space so that you can record any text you choose.

As always, feel free to let us know how you want us to improve Kantalk further.

David

We updated the site last night and incorporated some of the feedback you sent us.

For users who have created any LiveTalk in the past, you might have noticed you couldn’t cancel it if you happened to have a scheduling conflict. You are now able to cancel your future LiveTalk on My LiveTalk page.

For LiveTalk partipants who would like to make a comment or rate the LiveTalk you were just in, we now list all the most recently completed LiveTalks for your convenience.

We added My Friend Requests section on your home page. It will let you see pending friend requests from other members, in addition to receiving these requests in your regular email.

It’s been three exciting weeks since we launched the site. We appreciate your support and feedback. Please continue to share your enthusiasm, your passion, even your frustration in language learning with us and help us build a better community on KanTalk.

Danielle

We have scheduled a few LiveTalk through Skypecast in the past a few days, thinking to discuss social network trend among the language learners. But when the scheduled time arrived, and we tried to join the session, the Skype window popped up an error message, saying “This Skypecast Has Finished Already”.

Hmmm, either it’s a bug at Skypecast, or we are living in the past.

A quick search at Skype’s Forum (see link here) tells that we still live in the present; it’s the bug at Skypecast. It seems that this only occurs in the Skypecasts that are scheduled more than a few hours in advance; when you create a “Starting Now” skypecast, everything works like a charm.

We reported it through Skype’s Online Support a couple days ago. So far, the bug is still alive and malicious. For those who tried to join our LiveTalks but failed, we are sorry.

David

When we wrote our New Year resolution a week ago, the number one item on our list is to get Kantalk out. Well, we started off on the right foot. Today, Kantalk is in the open. One is checked off the list; nine more left to go. We are excited!

If you also wrote a New Year resolution, and put Learn To Speak English (or Spanish, or Korean, or French, …) on the list, then we hope Kantalk can help you start off on the right foot too.

To learn to speak a language, silence is not golden; talk is. At Kantalk, you can join other learners to practice spoken English, or any other language, over the Internet. Through live group conversation, you can meet new friends, build a supportive network, and share the learning experience. It’ll be fun.

Kantalk is still in the early stage of the development. But we wanted to put it out early, let you take a look and try it out. Tell us what features you want to see. We are eager to hear from you on how we can improve.

Please send your comment and suggestion at our Feedback page here.

Cheers,

David and Danielle