You can't really compare listening to an audiobook with being read to by someone who is in the room with you. The audiobook narrator keeps on going.
If your mind wanders while you walk or drive or whatever you're doing at the same time as the tape or CD or MP3 player is playing, you might lose the thread. And with the MP3 player, at least the dinky little thing I have, it's not worth the grief of trying to go back a minute or two. The other side of the coin here is that if there are dull, repetitive places in the book (this happens frequently with fiction), you have to slog through them.
One of the real learning experiences of listening to these books is hearing words pronounced. I love to listen to British narrators because they stress different syllables in ordinary words. I hate to hear any narrator read French with a French accent. I once listened to a Tom Paine biography and it seemed like half of it was in French. If I had been reading the printed page, I might have been able to get a grip on it but aloud, it was all Greek to me!
My current listen is a collection of essays about George Washington. This morning the author mentioned GW's complacence and that threw me. First of all, I am more accustomed to hearing the word complacency than complacence. Second of all, this complacence sounded like a positive trait. And I thought complacency was a sort of laziness. After my reading period ended (I walk), I looked up complacence. Then complacency. And that led me to complaisance. Which is an amiable thing, a gracious thing, a social skill. A homophone!
Here's a very fine list of homophones. Some of them are kind of bizarre (as opposed to bazaar), such as canapes and canopies. Another word lover has registered homophone.com and amassed quite a collection. Butt homophone.com dropped the bawl on complacence and complaisance. Suddenly, that's not exceptable to me!
I will give extra credit for eunuchs and UNIX, however.
If your mind wanders while you walk or drive or whatever you're doing at the same time as the tape or CD or MP3 player is playing, you might lose the thread. And with the MP3 player, at least the dinky little thing I have, it's not worth the grief of trying to go back a minute or two. The other side of the coin here is that if there are dull, repetitive places in the book (this happens frequently with fiction), you have to slog through them.
One of the real learning experiences of listening to these books is hearing words pronounced. I love to listen to British narrators because they stress different syllables in ordinary words. I hate to hear any narrator read French with a French accent. I once listened to a Tom Paine biography and it seemed like half of it was in French. If I had been reading the printed page, I might have been able to get a grip on it but aloud, it was all Greek to me!
My current listen is a collection of essays about George Washington. This morning the author mentioned GW's complacence and that threw me. First of all, I am more accustomed to hearing the word complacency than complacence. Second of all, this complacence sounded like a positive trait. And I thought complacency was a sort of laziness. After my reading period ended (I walk), I looked up complacence. Then complacency. And that led me to complaisance. Which is an amiable thing, a gracious thing, a social skill. A homophone!
Here's a very fine list of homophones. Some of them are kind of bizarre (as opposed to bazaar), such as canapes and canopies. Another word lover has registered homophone.com and amassed quite a collection. Butt homophone.com dropped the bawl on complacence and complaisance. Suddenly, that's not exceptable to me!
I will give extra credit for eunuchs and UNIX, however.