My friend Peter was playing with the auto-captioning feature on youtube, while watching the video I posted last week of my telling my cancer story to my 7th graders. Honestly, I had never played with this youtube feature before. I was vaguely aware of its existence but I had assumed that if the quality was anything like google translate, it wouldn’t be that useful.
I was right, but I’d underestimated its sheer entertainment value. Having watched my video in snippets with the captioning turned on, I’ve laughed several times.
Peter found and screenshotted one of the best, which he sent to me:
I found this one, too, which matches up with me saying “I feel great.”
I know the software is terrible, but seeing this nevertheless also induced some insecurities with respect to my enunciation, which of course is “re-learned” on my newly re-engineered tongue and vocal tract. I’ll keep working to improve on that. It’s important to me to provide comprehensible input to my students, and lately I’ve been worrying that they’re understanding even less than normal, and just being quiet out of pity or politeness. That’s a hard battle, in Korea.
