Unfortunately, my attempts at working my way through this exercise meant that I was trying to walk before I could crawl. I wrote it out carefully, leaving spaces between the French lines, with the aim of filling these with what I thought would be a fairly accurate sound of what I was listening to; so at the beginning "Au cœur du Massif des Maures, c'est autour de ce monastère que les religieux ont planté les premiers châtaigniers au XIIe siècle" would have above each word " oh cur dew mahseef da mawrs, say ohtour da suh monahstair releezhee-eur awn plontay lay prermeeai chattenya see-ecla".
I hesitate to think of what the readers of the above may think, but after I read a sentence with my own idea of what I considered the fairly accurate sound of the written French, I erased my efforts, and found that my own attempts tended to stick to the sounds of the written words. That said, I have found that even by trying to understand the words I can see, they go past at a speed which just doesn't relate at all to any sense of those sounds. The unnamed lady who begins this story spoke at a speed which allowed me to understand, but monsieur Autric spoke so quickly that the words seem to leave not the slightest gap between them, and the words appeared to blend one another into seamless sentences - not a criticism from me, but with my untuned ears. Whatever the case the several hours I listened to while watching the French words before me just didn't work. An example of this comes later in the story, ",,,,,,puisque tout est récoltés sur quelques semaines et dans la foulée, ....." which my ears think sound like this: "suhsooteleecoltiersuhkeltismenudahnlahfleeair". (suh sounds like the a in "a book".) II would welcome any comments on the above, and meanwhile I think I'll keep to the AI listening practice exercises.
Clive M
