131–140 of 166 posts
- māmā (incorrect)
- māma (correct)
Impressive 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…
Point being, this idea of a Universal Reference is exactly the kind of linguistic erasure that is wrongheaded to begin with. Nor does this completely prevent comprehension, these debates underestimate how much human communication is contextual, you read what I wrote above and most of it was your mind already filling in (gasp, like an LLM) the next words enabling you to read relatively quickly.
Anyone 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…
Most of it is passively paying attention. It should not be a struggle, it's one of those the more you struggle and overintellectualize the less time you are focusing on paying attention and letting your hearing ability do its work it was evolved to do.
The other thing is this whole emphasis on accents is misdirected. Teachers do not place this excessive emphasis on accents, it is people who want to sound "authentic" which is not a very wise goal of language learning in the first place.
I do think that learning music can help a little, especially a sonically complex instrument like violin and the like.
(caveat: I'm way oversimplifying on my Saturday afternoon, but that's my tentative views on this that I would try to argue for.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unlike Mandarin and other Chinese languages, Cantonese does not have tone sandhi and has changed tones instead. Cantonese tones are also different from those of Mandarin, so no, it can't be adopted for Cantonese and it would require a complete rework. > It is a surprisingly difficult language to learn. I keep hearing this quite a bit, but I do not find Cantonese to be any more difficult than most languages[0]. Or at…
Cantonese is "hard" mainly for two reasons- 1. tones, and generally the gatekeeping of some Cantonese communities towards people who haven't gotten the tones completely right 2. the lack of learning materials relative to the number of speakers, the confusion between written Chinese and written Cantonese (and also the general lack of the latter) As they say, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy"... I'll leav…
Impressive 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…
The other two are probably things that could be fixed with a bigger and more varied dataset.
Impressive 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…
> To a considerable extent, Mandarin exists because of tones. You cannot communicate in it with messed up tones.
These statements are false. If they were true, it would be impossible to understand written tone-free pinyin; in reality, it's not just possible but easy.
Longtime lurker, made an account specifically to give feedback here as an intermediate speaker. :) This is a great initiative and I hope to see more come out of this; I am not criticizing, but just want to provide my user experience here so you have data points. In short, my experience lines up with your native speakers. I found that it loses track of the phonemes when speaking quickly, and tones don't seem to line u…
I have just added sandhi support, please let me know if it's working better.
I wish this had a pinyin mode…! I am learning to speak Mandarin but I am not learning to read/write. ( I’m learning using a flashcards web app I made and continue to update with vocab I encounter or need: https://memalign.github.io/m/mandarin/cards/index.html )