On completion of this training sequence,
you will be able to learn how to breathe with your belly,
how to manage your oxygen intake to support dictation,
and how to use breathing to support endurance,
or the capacity to subtitle for long periods of time.
This is the agenda of this presentation.
As you have seen, a respeaker has to do many things at the same time.
In this video lecture, we are going to deal with dictation skills.
Dictation skills is the first set of skills a respeaker has to learn,
as dictation is the main tool the respeaker possesses
to do their job as professionally as possible.
Like one’s hands for a typist,
a respeaker has to train dictation skills every day in order to automate them.
In this Element, we will deal with 3 main dictation skills,
namely breathing to support dictation and endurance,
enunciation to support accuracy, and the third one is aimed at reaching MARS,
or the capacity of a respeaker to speak as rapidly and accurately as possible.
Let’s get started with Breathing.
The other two skills will be dealt with
in the remaining two video lectures of this element.
All living creatures breathe.
As humans, we breathe in two main manners, depending on habits and position.
These are chest breathing and belly breathing.
Chest breathing is the normal way of breathing
when standing or sitting in an upright position.
It is relatively shallow and as you can learn from the many sources available on the web,
it does not use the full capacity of your lungs.
Belly breathing is also quite natural among humans,
especially when lying in a horizontal position,
as gravitation does not force the diaphragm down.
Belly breathing is characterized by the capacity of the lungs
to make the most of oxygen intake.
Professional singers, runners, and also respeakers use belly breathing.
In particular, this is needed to always have enough oxygen in the lungs
to avoid two opposite situations:
holding one's breath for too long and breathing too repetitively.
In this section 1, I will try to teach you some tips to learn how to belly breathe
so as to increase the efficiency of your lungs.
To begin with, it is important you understand
if you already breathe with your belly or not.
To understand this, sit in an upright position,
similarly to the one you are going to adopt when respeaking.​
Then, put one hand on your belly just below your ribs,
and the other hand on your chest.
Now, start breathing and see what happens.
If the hand on your belly moves,
you can jump to section 2 of this video lecture, Dictation.
If it doesn’t move, then you need to learn how to breathe with your belly only.​
Take a deep breath in through your nose, and let your belly push your hand out.
Then, breathe out through pursed lips as if you were whistling, like this.
Feel the hand on your belly go in, and use it to push all the air out.
While inhaling and exhaling, your chest should not move.
If it does, you need to repeat the exercise
by putting some pressure on the hand on your belly.
It may happen that the hand on your belly keeps not moving.
Keep trying until it does move.
Each time put a little more pressure if necessary.
If it doesn’t move in the next 15 minutes, stop trying,
as you may start stressing too much for this exercise.
You can try later.
In a week you should be able to make it.
Online there are many websites that can help you with this.
Once you have learnt how to breathe with your belly,
you need to automate it, as you should not spend energy on breathing.
To do so, move to advanced breathing exercises​.
You need to find a part of the day, preferably at the very beginning of the day,
which you are going to use to daily practice breathing for at least 5 minutes.
Then, you need to start holding your breath.
Pay attention, you don’t have to wait until it becomes unbearable.
You need to always feel comfortable with it.
To do this, take a deep, slow breath from your belly,
and silently count to 4.
Then, hold your breath, and silently count from 1 to 7.
And finally, you can breathe out completely
as you silently count from 1 to 8.
It is enough you repeat this exercise for five minutes.
Every week, try to set the bar higher than the week before
until you reach your maximum.
Finally, you can practice what is called breath walking,
or the capacity to synchronise your steps with your breathing.
Find a place where you can walk freely,
without having to stop too often or to change direction too often.
For 10 minutes, try and match each step with a fraction of your breathing pattern.
Personally, I am very comfortable with inhaling completely for 4 steps,
holding my breath for the next 4 steps
and use the following 4 steps to completely exhale.
This is a very a good exercise to automate your breathing.
To be able and use breathing to support dictation,
you first need to automate belly breathing.
If you need to think about belly breathing,
you will spend too much of your processing capacity.
Once belly breathing is automated, you can start with dictation exercises.
Start by reading a written text, preferably an essay or an editorial.
You should notice an improvement
in terms of how easy and accurate the final result is.
Then, you can move to verbatim and sensatim shadowing exercises.
Again, you should notice an improvement in terms of how easy the process is.
If you feel awkward,
it means you have to invest a little more in automating your belly breathing.
Finally, you can go with both verbatim and sensatim respeaking.
Here, you should not just notice an improvement
in terms of how easy the process is,
but also in terms of how good the final result is.
However, this should not be your priority now.
What is important here is that you are feeling better
with the exercise.
Don’t be worried if you still feel a little awkward.
It may mean you are either tired,
or that your breathing skills have not been fully automated.
In this last section,
we will deal with some practical exercises that you need to do
to support endurance through breathing.
As you may know at this stage of your training,
respeaking is a challenging profession.
The breathing exercises we have done so far
are meant to facilitate the process of respeaking.
However, we need to also use breathing
to keep the high quality of your product in the long run,
as if you are good respeaking 5 minutes,
you may find it harder to work for 30 minutes or a whole day.
To use your breathing to support endurance, you can start by a very simple exercise.
Remember the breath-walk I have mentioned in the previous section?
Imagine your lungs are divided into 4 equal parts of oxygen.
Now, fill them in.
Your lungs should be full of oxygen.
Start reading the same text as before while exhaling.
When you have no more oxygen in your lungs, stop reading
and count how many words and characters you managed to read.
Now, fill 2 of the 4 parts of oxygen in your lungs.
Pay attention not to cheat, though unintentionally.
Your lungs should be half full.
Your goal is to read the same amount of text as before.
Once again, before inhaling again,
put a mark after the last word you managed to comfortably read
and see how many words and characters you managed to read.
If you have read more than a half of the text you read with your lungs full,
this means you have started managing your breathing properly.
Now, fill only 1 of the 4 parts of oxygen in your lungs.
Again, pay attention not to cheat, though unintentionally.
Only one quarter of your lungs should be full of oxygen.
Your goal is to read the same amount of text you read the first time,
when your lungs were full of oxygen.
Once again, before inhaling again,
put a mark after the last word you managed to comfortably read
and see how many words and characters you managed to dictate.
If you have read more than a half of the text you read with your lungs half full,
this means you are keeping improving.
Repeat this exercise
until you manage to comfortably read 20 words,
accounting for around 100 characters,
with one quarter of oxygen intake only.
A sentence in the real world is normally not longer than that.
Once you have reached this stage,
it means that you can read a sentence with a minimum oxygen intake.
Repeat this exercise by first shadowing a speech
and then respeaking a speech.
The aim is always the same:
to manage to comfortably shadow or respeak 20 words, accounting for 100 characters,
with one quarter of oxygen intake only.
Once you are comfortable with this,
you will be able to find your pace in respeaking
by managing your breathing
according to the number of pauses in the speech to subtitle.
In the next video lecture, we will see how to improve quality of recognition.
In this video lecture,
we have seen how important it is to breathe with your belly.
Then, we have seen how to manage your oxygen intake to support dictation.
Finally, we have seen how to use breathing to support endurance,
or the capacity to subtitle for long periods of time
thanks to gradual breathing exercises.