After featuring foreigners who spoke Chinese really fluently, I decided to look into foreigners who could speak Korean fluently.  In my search I came across a KBS (Korean Broadcasting Show) called “미녀들의 수다.”  “Global Talk Show” is the official English translation of the show according to KBS, but other English translations include: Talk with beauties, Talking with beauties, a Chat with Beauties, and even the Beauties’ Chatterbox.  The premise of the show is quite simple.  Get beautiful foreign females who live in Korea and get them together to discuss various topics related to Korea.  

The panel of females includes women from such countries as New Zealand, Canada, Peru, Japan, etc…here’s a screenshot from the official 미녀들의 수다 (Global Talk Show) website highlighting some of the female panelists on the show (click on the image to view the full list of panelists):

Wikipedia’s brief description states the Global Talk Show or a Chat with Beauties:

is a television program on Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) in South Korea. The show is a survey of foreign women who reside in South Korea who discuss their experiences and cultures in talk show format. After high viewer ratings from its first broadcast on October 7th, 2006 during the Korean harvest festival holiday, it became a regularly broadcast program starting November 26th, 2006.

Here’s an English guided video tour of  미녀들의 수다 (Global Talk Show):

And here’s a sample portion of the show that someone has subtitled in English (warning some of the English translated is not perfect, but it’s definitely better than nothing):

Apparently the show isn’t without critics as discovered by A Year in Mokpo who found that:

When the show began the women on the panel were mostly old hands, Korea-wise, in particular American Leslie Benson, who’s spent 11 years in Korea and speaks fluent Korean. The show was mostly people who know Korea well telling Koreans about their own country, gently pointing out some of Korea’s less proud aspects, in particular, its sexism.
…
Well after plodding these well-worn boards for a long time, these topics have ceased to be interesting. Anybody out there who watches this program will notice that in an effort to maintain the interest of basically talking about in-your-face old ladies, drinking soju and eating dog meat, they have changed the format from ‘knowledgeable foreigners discuss their experiences in Korea thoughtfully’ to ‘buckwild foreign chicks who don’t know anything about Korea and can barely speak Korean say shocking, uninformed things in barely understandable Korean’

I can’t really comment on the quality of their spoken Korean, but I know the young attractive female beauties of “A Chat with Beauties” are much better than I am, but then again that isn’t saying much!

**Update**

I found some more info the show and these “Beauties.”  If you scroll down the page it lists some very basic information on each of the hosts (like what ethnicity they are and their picture).  Check it out here.

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For better or for worse , I’ve started to notice a trend in foreign language education.  Apparently, pandas are the most qualified to teach children foreign languages.   Of all of nature’s animals–monkeys, giraffes, sharks, owls, etc … — pandas are the one animal who’s language ability surpasses all the other animals and is the animal that children will listen to while learning languages.  Don’t believe me?  Just take a look at some of the products out there which feature pandas as the teacher.

Panfu: virtual language learning world
	Panfu is an online language learning world for teaching children Spanish.  According to their website their pandas have taught over 4.5 million users.  If you follow their guide you can get a “virtual tour of the world of pandas!“
Click here to view the embedded video.
Little Pim: language learning DVD’s
	Little Pim is a series of French, Chinese, and Spanish language immersion DVD’s for children.  It’s taught by none other than Little Pim, the PANDA!  Interestingly, this series of DVD’s was developed by the daughter of Paul Pimsleur (the famous applied linguist which the Pimsleur series of learning cd’s was named after).
Click here to view the embedded video.
Mandy and Pandy: Chinese learning books
	Mandy and Pandy are a series of Chinese learning books for kids which feature Mandy (a little girl) and her friend Pandy, which if you haven’t guess…is a PANDA!  Together through their adventures they learn Chinese.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Early Start Mandarin:  Chinese learning books and DVD’s
	Eartly Start Mandarin is a series of books and videos for learning Mandarin featuring Bao Bei the PANDA.  I don’t mean any disrespect to the company or what they are doing, but of all the pandas feature, I find this one the most disturbing…Bao Bei scares me.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Pandamanda:  virtual language learning world
	I have to be honest, even I was not immune to the panda language teaching phenomenon.  A few years ago I entered a business plan competiton with a plan to create an online virtual language learning world for children called Pandamanda.   When I saw Panfu (above) it made me think of my own project.  However, in our world you were guided by Agent Pandamanda, a secret agent who was your partner as you solved various cases / mysteries out of the Pandamanda headquarters.  It was around the time where I had been watching a lot of the show 24 and was inspired (so in my case Agent Pandamanda was to be like Agent Jack Baur, minus all the violence of course…).  We never built the world, but we did for ask $4 million dollars to do so.  For some reason no one gave us the money

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If you are wondering why I didn’t include the whole Braveheart “Freedom” speech from the movie it’s because some of the tested tools have word or character limits so I couldn’t fit all the text in.  Either way, it’s pretty fun to see how far the technology has come along.  In the video this is what was demonstrated:

1. Mac OSX Speech Bruce voice
2. Oddcast.com Daniel (UK) Voice
3. Oddcast.com Charles (UK) Voice
4. acapela-group.com Graham (UK) Voice
5. acapela-group.com Peter (UK) Voice

Mac OS X Text to Speech

The first TTS tool you see in the video, the one with just text on the screen, is the built in Mac OSX text to speech tool.  If you didn’t know, all Macs have the ability to convert text to spoken speech.  However, as you can tell the quality is not that good.  Also, as of now the Mac TTS only speaks English, so for people learning languages other than English it’s not really a good tool other than to amuse your friends.

Oddcast Text to Speech

The second TTS tool is from a company called Oddcast.  They are an interesting company that on top of TTS also have different applications that allow you to do various stuff with media (like upload your picture onto a potato and animate it).  What’s unique about Oddcast is that they have an animated avatar (character) that mouths the words as it speaks.  This provides even more amusement than just hearing the text alone.  The speaking on it is much better especially compared with Mac TTS.  It has over 20 languages (Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, etc…) with over 60 different voices to choose from.   English alone has American, UK, Australian, Irish, and Indian voices.  If try it out you’ll notice that the avatar’s head will follow your mouse around as you move it.  It’s kind of freaky.

Acapela Group TTS

The final demo in the video was Acapela Group’s TTS tool.  Out of all the tools compared here I would say this is the best in terms of quality.  The speaking is pretty realistic and it’s very straightforward to use.  You don’t get the talking heads, as many languages, or the variety of voices, but in terms of sound quality it’s scary how realistic it is.  In terms of languages they cover 25 languages with over 50 voices.  The only drawback is that they don’t do Asian languages, but they do include the other popular languages like French, German, Spanish, etc…

TTS in Foreign Language Learning

The text to speech tools comparison I showed above was using English, but what about speaking other foreign languages?   From my experimenting with French and Spanish using Acapela’s TTS I can say it sounds pretty good as well, however you have to take what I say with a grain of salt since I’m a native English speaker and have very little French and Spanish skills.  The best way is for you to evaluate for yourself:

Bottom line, I definitely would reccommend using either the Oddcast or Acapela TTS tools in your foreign language study program.  First of all it’s FREE.  Second of all, it’s very convenient having a tool that can speak any phrase or words you come across, especially more so if you are a beginner who is still grappling with pronuncation for a new language  It’s like having a native speaker in your pocket that you can pull out and force it to say whatever you want, whenever you want.  Oh yeah, and it’s FREE!

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