ENG 202: Audio Accompaniments

I have designed these audio tracks as accompaniments, for you to listen to while you are, simultaneously, looking at the printed page of some of our early English readings: they shouldn’t be listened to on their own (listened to on their own, they’ll often make the reading confusing, even nonsensical), and should not be used as a replacement for the assigned printed text reading. On each track, I do my best to simply read the assigned early English class text to you aloud in a modern English accent, while you follow along visually with the printed text; my reading will thus clarify those basic words whose early spelling might trip you up otherwise, and use vocal cues to help point up the logic and coherence of the early sentences.  I will sometimes reorder words slightly, or once in a while will replace a word, where doing so doesn’t interrupt or shift the text much — but I’ll also leave a lot of early English words as is, requiring you to pay attention to the glosses and notes on your printed text, and sometimes to pause and look something up. 

And in cases where it matters that there are multiple distinct characters or speakers saying the words, I may use different voices — sometimes rather cartoonish ones, since those are the most easy to differentiate — to distinguish them.  These accompaniments take quite a while to do, and so they are often done roughly by necessity, and once they’re done, I only re-listen to them rarely myself: so please, if you hear anything that could be done better or should be fixed—be it an audio mixing issue, a translation issue, a line I’m simply not getting right, or anything else—please let me know what the issue is, and the timestamp of when in the track it happens.

These audio accompaniments are always optional: you must do the early English reading assigned, and you must do what you have to do in order to understand and enjoy the reading, but it is always a good thing to challenge yourself to read some or all of that reading on its own (i.e., without the audio accompaniment).  Feel free to turn off the audio for some or all of the reading — and to experiment with what works best for you.