Ashley

Very Weird Narration Tempo

Revisado: 12-29-22

I’ve listened to more Star Wars audiobooks than I care to count. This was the first one to which I was constantly cringing while listening. The performance was not bad at voice varieties (though if you’re used to Marc Thompson, prepare to be disappointed); but the narrator constantly fumbled the tempo. Imagine Captain Kirk recounting a fight scene. Anywhere that the text had sentences split between narration and speech, the listener is jarred completely out of the story by poor interpretation of punctuation.

For example, if the text was: “Anakin,” she cried. “Don’t do it!”

The user hears: “Anakin!” [Full stop.] She cried. “Don’t do it!”

These are different meanings! In the first, “she cried” describes HOW the speech was issued. In the second, she says the word “Anakin,” then stops, takes a break to cry over a cup of tea, perhaps, then returns to her monologue with “don’t do it.”

These missed punctuation cues are very distracting and pretty constant. You can actually hear it at least once in the sample clip, but I was eager to get through the trilogy and bought it anyway. I hope they’ll re-record this to fix these issues for future fans.

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Looking for Alternatives

Revisado: 01-08-22

Cons: This audiobook leaves a lot wanting for honors of Italian. The performer slurs words quite a bit. This is typical for native speakers, but incredibly frustrating for learners interested in reproducing the sounds. Each phrase is repeated twice; it would be preferable for the first instance to be natural as you may hear in conversation, while the second instance could be much more enunciated for the benefit of learning. (Paul Noble’s audiobooks epitomize how these can be performed! Start there if you haven’t already.) Similarly, there is no space given for the learner to repeat the Italian. My last critique is somewhat minor, but the English phrases are often hard to understand or they’re improper English.

Pros: there are a TON of phrases and I greatly appreciate that they are sorted by topic and that the chapters are named appropriately. This is the right way to organize an audiobook. Also, the sound quality itself is not bad for an amateur recording, where many language instructional recordings have a lot of background noise or poor microphone quality.

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Marc Thompson

Revisado: 08-28-21

I will never get tired of hearing Marc Thompson narrate Timothy Zhan’s stories. Another exquisite installment of their combined talents.

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My Ears Hurt

Revisado: 08-05-21

Atrocious grammar, performed by what I can only imagine is the world’s glitchiest speech robot. If there was any content to this Audible, I couldn’t find it beneath the distracting and constant mispronounciations and nauseating abuse of business buzz words.

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Rushed Production of Mediocre Book

Revisado: 04-18-21

The content of the book is wildly repetitive, especially with the disclaimers. “We’re not trying to tell you everything about ___, just give you an introduction.” “____ adheres to the Agile manifesto.” “_____ has both pros and cons.” Some wording of each of those is in EVERY chapter! The performance was very lackluster, not that I really blame the narrator. There were a few subtle jokes woven into the text for which the narrator (which may have been a sub-literate robot?) didn’t change inflection or cadence. There were also a ton of grammatical errors (mostly tense and plurality mismatches) that were pretty distracting. All of that is really secondary to the total lack of substance, though. This book could have been 20 minutes long if the fluff was left out. I wanted the features of the methodologies, and those were delivered (poorly, as often the listing format didn’t suit the monotone narrator), but an attempt at understanding via examples wasn’t even broached. Further, every process was described from a strictly software development point of view. I get that the methodologies originated in that realm, but the introduction touts how far the Agile framework has evolved beyond that. Even software types would likely benefit from exploring those applications! This read like a lazy first-year comp sci student’s midterm paper.

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Pfan Pfood

Revisado: 02-22-20

I’ve long enjoyed Dan Pfeiffer’s insights on Pod Saves America. I was a little bummed when he started advertising the book because no mention of the Audible was made, and who has time to read? So I’m very grateful this exists, and it definitely doesn’t disappoint. Great performance.

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