How do you know that what it tells you is correct if you can't hear it yourself?
Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
121–130 of 166 posts
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#122This is fantastic. Been looking for a way to get feedback on my pronunciation since I came back from Shanghai and haven't been seeing native speakers every day. Is there any plan to make this a download for desktop or mobile? Would be using it weekly to get back up to par on Mandarin
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the correct. I was first called this by a Chinese classmate from Beijing with a biting sense of humor, when I was at university in Tokyo. We got on really well, to be clear. :) Hanging out with him was actually how I got started with Mandarin, probably why I chose this username.
I remember when first learning Mandarin coming across a phrase '你发福了' which literally compliments someone on blessings (i.e. having become more wealthy) but idiomatically means you gained weight.
I really like this one. It's delightfully cheeky. :)
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#124Any plans on releasing the inference/training code?
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#125Anyone that is a native European language speaker that hasn't tried to learn Chinese or some other tonal language, its really hard to understand how hard it is. The tones can really be very subtle, and your ear is not fine tuned to them. So you think you are saying it right, but native speakers have no idea what you are saying.
As a native Mandarin speaker, I always think the most difficult feature in English (and a few other European languages, like French) are the rich vowels. Like done vs down, beat vs bit, trailing dark l vs -ou/-u sound, and frequent vowel reduction in speech. Even worse, different English dialects randomly shift vowels (maybe like how Mandarin dialects use different tones). Neither my ear nor my mouth is tuned. From Wikipedia "English phonology":
> The number of vowels is subject to greater variation; in the system presented on this page there are 20–25 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14–16 in General American and 19–21 in Australian English.
Native English speakers, if they are not teachers, tend to underestimate the challenge. I see YouTube videos that the western Chinese learner hypothesizes Spanish is most difficult for Chinese to learn because of the RR consonant -- I learned Spanish casually for a few years and I disagree. RR is difficult to pronounce, but I can clearly hear it and I won't confuse it with a different sound. In contrast to English, Spanish vowels are so easy.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#126[dead]
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#127Anyone that is a native European language speaker that hasn't tried to learn Chinese or some other tonal language, its really hard to understand how hard it is. The tones can really be very subtle, and your ear is not fine tuned to them. So you think you are saying it right, but native speakers have no idea what you are saying.
As a native Mandarin speaker, I always think the most difficult feature in English (and a few other European languages, like French) are the rich vowels. Like done vs down, beat vs bit, trailing dark l vs -ou/-u sound, and frequent vowel reduction in speech. Even worse, different English dialects randomly shift vowels (maybe like how Mandarin dialects use different tones). Neither my ear nor my mouth is tuned. From W…
Spanish is such a blessing as mispronouncing a word rarely changes the meaning.
Whereas in Chinese or to a lesser degree English, you have to very mindful on how you pronounce stuff.
As a native Spanish speaker the thing I dread the most is grammar and the absurd amount of verbal times there are. Even native speakers don't speak with perfect grammar.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#128Anyone that is a native European language speaker that hasn't tried to learn Chinese or some other tonal language, its really hard to understand how hard it is. The tones can really be very subtle, and your ear is not fine tuned to them. So you think you are saying it right, but native speakers have no idea what you are saying.
The tones are really not as difficult as people make them out to be. 90% of the effort in learning any language is just learning massive amounts of vocabulary. Things like tone and grammar are the very basics that you learn right at the beginning.‡ Beginners complain about them, but after a few months of studying Chinese, you should be fairly comfortable with the tones. Then, you spend years learning vocabulary. The…
Your comment is written as it learning a language was not a subjective experience, which could not be further from the actual thing
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good to see that there are others learning and creating! Another shameless plug for my translator site: https://pingtype.github.io It takes text, adds colours for tones, pinyin, literal, and parallel translations. There’s also a character decomposition tool at the bottom of the page which can be helpful if you’re able to recognise half a character but can’t remember the pronunciation for typing it. The YouTube channe…
Wow, the tool for decomposing characters is very cool! I assume you are talking about the thing that appears, when I click "Matrix"? I think it would be good to have "decompose characters" somewhere. But I might actually use this to get the component characters. In my app in my vocabulary file I also have tags for words, which are like "component: ", so that if one knows how parts of a character, one could also searc…
Thanks for your long and thoughtful reply!
Matrix is just a visualisation tool, I never actually found a practical use for it other than looking cool.
The decomposition feature is at the bottom of the page below the generated HTML. It's the text box with "隹" and a Search button. Clicking Search will show the 2 parts of the character, and all characters that contain that radical (䧶, 䳡, etc), and all multi-character words containing that character.
Clicking any of the related characters (or numeric codes for radicals that don't have a Unicode representation) will then show the genealogy for that character.
See "copying from images" in http://localhost/pingtype/docs/docs.html
If I ever come to Berlin then your meetup sounds fun! I'm pretty far away though; I live in New Zealand now.
All the best with your learning, I hope you keep making progress!
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#130Impressive work! The idea and the UI is very intuitive. Though, as a guy who speaks perfect mandarin from Beijing, I’m struggle even to pass the easy ones… So it can definitely used some improvements. The example 你好吃饭了吗 returns hào → hǎo, fān → fàn, le → liǎo. The first two are the model listen my tone mistakenly, and the last one should be le instead of liǎo in this context. Also I see in the comment section people…
Please allow me to share some of my views. I'm a native Mandarin speaker. > I can guarantee that tones are not particularly useful and that you can communicate with native speakers with all the tones messed up, and that's perfectly fine. Not at all. Tones are extremely important. If you have all the tones messed up, you can hardly communicate in Mandarin. It's true, as you said, that different regions of China have d…
Well, as a northern guy, I do find myself able to understand Mandarin even from Yunnan easily without prior learning. The harder ones for me, like the Hefei dialect, are because the pronunciation is very different, not the tone. Nanjing dialect, on the otherhand, is also from the same Jianghuai Mandarin group as Hefei, which is perfect intelligentable for me.
Even for non-Mandarin/Guanhua, such as the Shanxi dialect, I can understand them because the pronunciation is much closer to mine, just the tones are completely novel.