is there a English or Japanese learning model like this?
Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
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Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#142[dead]
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#143[dead]
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried just repeating guó for as many times as symbols and repetition was not recognized. Although I like the active aspect of the approach. Language apps where sound is the main form of learning should have a great advantage, as any written text just confuses as every country has its own spin on orthography. Even pinyin, despite making sense, for a beginner, has so many conflicting symbols.
> I tried just repeating guó for as many times as symbols and repetition was not recognized. Can you elaborate? I'm not sure I understand.
I think he's saying transliteration and romanization is horribly flawed in some instances.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#145Earlier 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…
Given that linguistics does not have a concept of what makes a language «hard» or not, the language hardness classification is highly subjective and perceptional.
I have already commented on why I do not think that Cantonese tones are hard, so I will leave it at that – it is the first, oft repeated myth that is not based on facts.
> 2. the lack of learning materials relative to the number of speakers […]
On the subject of the availability of learning materials, there would have been a strong case for, e.g. Wu (Shanghainese), Min (Hokkien), Hakka etc – for all of which the learning materials virtually do not exist, and that is true.
With Cantonese, it is a remarkably different situation. My local bookshop has two large shelves stacked with Cantonese textbooks and dictionaries that suit a range of people from vastly different age groups – from toddlers starting to babble to serious advanced learners and anyone in between. More is available online, e.g. Virginia Yip's Routledge series, which includes a comprehensive book on the Cantonese grammar of rarely seen quality and coverage, Robert Bauer and Victor Mair's «ABC Cantonese-English Comprehensive Dictionary», and many more. There are online resources, an open-source, cross-platform «Jyut Dictionary», Google and Apple support the Cantonese keyboard etc.
If their printed versions are not easily locally available, they can be purchased as Kindle books as well.
Granted, Mandarin surpasses Cantonese in terms of the quantity of learning materials, and that is a dry fact.
> […] the confusion between written Chinese and written Cantonese […]
Many languages have quirks or come with a wealth of idiosyncrasies when it comes to how the language is spoken and written down. Burmese, Thai, and Tibetan, for example, are written according to extremely archaic pronunciation rules to the point that spoken and written languages have to be learned separately.
Written Cantonese has existed since at least the Ming dynasty[0][1], but the reasons why there are two distinct forms are entirely different as they go back to replacing Classical Chinese, which had become incomprehensible to anyone in the late 19th century without years of dedicated study, with a modern standard written standard based on northern Chinese varieties.
> […] (and also the general lack of the latter).
This is the second often repeated myth. Many Cantonese speakers believe that Cantonese can only be spoken but not written down, which is patently false – if a language has a writing system, it can be written down with it. When pressed with question «why do you think so», there is typically no answer or «because we have been told so». 口語粵語好容易用漢字寫低，就好似書面粵語咁。 There is a real issue of some native Cantonese words not having dedicated Chinese characters for them, but it is more of a philosophical disgreement between the academics rather than an insurmountable problem.
So, in reality – at least in Hong Kong – since formal literacy has long meant competence in Standard Written Chinese, not in a full Cantonese-written system, schools and institutions tend to penalise written vernacular Cantonese forms in formal contexts – entirely for non-linguistic reasons as explained in [2].
To sum it up, I do not find any of the counterarguments to be compelling, persuasive or supported by linguistic facts which would make Cantonese a «hard» language.
[0] https://www.fe.hku.hk/clear/doc/WC%20and%20Implications%20fo... – «The story of written Cantonese begins in the Ming dynasty with texts printed in woodblock print books called wooden fish books (木魚書)»
[1] https://cantoneseforfamilies.com/cantonese-vernacular-and-fo...
[2] https://hkupress.hku.hk/image/catalog/pdf-preview/9789622097...
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#146Longtime 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…
Thank for the great feedback! I have just added sandhi support, please let me know if it's working better.
ACKing your comment.
Will check once the TV is off in the house. :)
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Learning 10,000 words is objectively more difficult than getting used to tones.
You can get used to the tones in a relatively short amount of time. If you are in an immersive environment for a month or two, you will end up wondering how it is that anyone can't hear the tones.
In contrast, there is simply no way to memorize thousands of words in that timeframe.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yours is the first comment I strongly agree with; as a multilingual/bicultural Asian American, children don't have this supposed difficulty hearing tones. 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 th…
I agree on not over-intellectualizing the tones.
I've seen people struggle to pronounce a word when I explicitly tell them what tones it contains, but then pronounce it perfectly when I ask them to just imitate me.
But I disagree about accents. One of the major flaws in most foreign language education, in my opinion, is that pronunciation is not emphasized heavily enough at the beginning. Being able to pronounce the basic sounds correctly has a huge impact on how native speakers perceive your language skills, even if you're not very advanced in the language.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#149Nice now just add Thai support ;)
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Given that linguistics does not have a concept of what makes a language «hard» or not, the language hardness classification is highly subjective and perceptional. I have already commented on why I do not think that Cantonese tones are hard, so I will leave it at that – it is the first, oft repeated myth that is not based on facts. > 2. the lack of learning materials relative to the number of speakers […] On the subje…
You're absolutely right in theory and in linguistics.
The issue is that among the more common languages that people (outside of language nerds) tend to learn, what I said still holds true for the average learner who's there to learn and whom face the practical difficulties of learning a language, and none of your totally correct linguistic facts really make them less real.
> > […] (and also the general lack of the latter).
> This is the second often repeated myth
The size of written Cantonese corpora was abysmally small up until recent (Trust me when I say I'm one of the many people who worked hard to make this "myth" not true (not in linguistic theory but in practice). I never knew it would be thrown back to me like this as a lecture on a random forum lol.
There's a lot more to be done to make Cantonese an assessable language for learners compared with the other major languages. You can compare the linguistic properties of languages all you want, and you'd be absolutely right, but that doesn't make a difference to the prospective learner at all.