Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

simedw.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 166 posts

Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

#151

Post by hnfong »

calf wrote: post #136
hnfong wrote: post #76

Earlier 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…

You seem to be confusing/overgeneralizing the understandable resentment of "some Cantonese" who likely had bad experiences of postcolonialism and/or authoritarian-revanchist state policies. If Hong Kong diaspora has a poor reception towards newcomers to their local microculture, maybe it's because the people attempting to engage are not treading lightly with those actual historical legacies in mind.

"Taiwanese lectures Hong Konger about Hong Kong" is a recurring meme on Threads among local Hong Kongers. I didn't expect I'd experience one here.

I mean, I know I am supposed to refute your point with rational points, but I really don't know what to say except that you're wrong, and you're confusing the cultural divide between Cantonese speakers and non-Cantonese speakers, and the political tensions between Hong Kong and mainland China.

Note that I never said "Hong Kong" in my comment because the majority of Cantonese speakers are actually in mainland China.

Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

#152

Post by thaumasiotes »

ronyeh wrote: post #58
laurieg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone who hasn't grown up speaking an language with tones or pitches, the process of learning them can be maddening. I applaud anyone who makes tools like this to try to make the process easier. My experience in learning Japanese pitch accent was eye-opening. At the start, I couldn't hear any difference. On quizzes I essentially scored the same as random guessing. The first thing that helped me a lot was notici…

> For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual. Wow… Thanks for making it clear that English also has tones! I hadn’t thought of it this way before. “Uh-huh” sounds similar to Mandarin tones 3 & 2. “Uh-oh” is similar to Cantonese tones 1 & 3. I’m wondering if we can find good examples to…

Pitch levels are important enough in English that native speakers spontaneously develop ways to write them down, even though the standard written language has no way to indicate them.

However, they operate at the level of the sentence rather than the individual word, which sets up a conflict if an English speaker wants to learn Chinese.

The most common uses of pitch in English are to annotate the grammatical structure of a sentence, making it clear which words belong together in larger phrases, and to mark yes/no questions.

English does have one clear example of lexical tone, the "I don't know" word, which is pronounced very similarly to the Mandarin pinyin éēě. (If pronounced with the mouth open. With the mouth closed, it would be more like 嗯嗯嗯 in the same 2-1-3 tone sequence.)

Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

#153

Post by thaumasiotes »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #148
calf wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That's true, but it counsels against trying to develop better pronunciation early.

If you sound like a native despite having just started to learn the language, people will naturally conclude that you are mentally retarded.

Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

#154

Post by cyberax »

thenthenthen wrote: post #82
cyberax wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a native Russian speaker, and I decided to learn Mandarin, because it's linguistically almost the opposite of Russian. I had no problems with tone pronunciation, but tone recognition was indeed much trickier. I still often get lost when listening to fast speech although I can follow formal speech (news) usually without problems.

Euro speaker here, no problem with recognising tones but speaking them…:/

Are you studying a language with contour tones or with high/mid tone distinction? I tried to study a bit of Thai, and the high/mid tone distinction was a complete show-stopper for me.

Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

#155

Post by dapangzi »

simedw wrote: post #139
dapangzi wrote: post #13

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…

Thank for the great feedback! I have just added sandhi support, please let me know if it's working better.

Still having some issues that match my previous comment, I'll try to follow your blog and give more feedback as you work on it.

Will comment that the shorter phrases (2-4 characters long) were generally accurate at normal speed, but the longer sentences have issues.

Maybe focusing on the accuracy of the smaller phrases and then scaling that might be a good way to go, since those smaller phrases are returning better accuracy.

Again, really think this is a great initiative, want to see how it grows. :)

Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

#156

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #153
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. That's true, but it counsels against trying to develop better pronunciation early. If you sound like a native despite having just started to learn the language, people will naturally conclude that you are mentally retarded.

That's better than locking in a strong accent the rest of your life. Once you learn to speak a language, it's very difficult to fix your accent.

Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

#157

Post by thaumasiotes »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #156
thaumasiotes wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's true, but it counsels against trying to develop better pronunciation early. If you sound like a native despite having just started to learn the language, people will naturally conclude that you are mentally retarded.

That's better than locking in a strong accent the rest of your life. Once you learn to speak a language, it's very difficult to fix your accent.

There are two problems with this:

(1) It doesn't get any more difficult to fix your accent. But most people won't, because there's virtually no benefit to doing it.

This is related to

(2) Once you learn to speak a language, you're not at any risk of people thinking that you can't speak it, even if you speak with a strong accent.

Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

#158

Post by nathanhammond »

inkyoto wrote: post #145
hnfong wrote: post #76

Earlier 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 both are in violent agreement and it is amusing to see in the wild.

As an 外國人 who learned Cantonese as an adult (I moved to HK) I'm jealous of the quantity and quality of materials that exist for learning (not Cantonese). That being said, there are _enough_ materials so it's nowhere near as rough as e.g. Shanghainese.

My opinions on hard language reduces to "is this the first language you're learning from a particular language family?" If so, it's hard to learn. But "is ontologically hard" isn't something that I think is really worth ranking. Any four year old can speak their mother tongue just fine.

But the perception of "hard to learn" did work in my favor for learning Cantonese: as a 鬼佬 who speaks Cantonese I was given lots of latitude to be bad while learning because of that perception. And now I could go back and learn Mandarin now and it would be _much_ simpler than the task that I had in learning Cantonese.

That being said I still write in 口語. Slowly learning 書面語 as I read more and more of it.

Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

#159

Post by hnfong »

nathanhammond wrote: post #158
inkyoto wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 both are in violent agreement and it is amusing to see in the wild. As an 外國人 who learned Cantonese as an adult (I moved to HK) I'm jealous of the quantity and quality of materials that exist for learning (not Cantonese). That being said, there are _enough_ materials so it's nowhere near as rough as e.g. Shanghainese. My opinions on hard language reduces to "is this the first language you're learning from a parti…

Hi Nathan, long time no see! :)

(Not sure if you remember or recognize me from this handle. I was with Chaak on the words.hk project . Also Jon spoke highly of you for helping with the tough problems on the fonts :D )

Post reply on HN