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

161–166 of 166 posts

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

#161

Post by nathanhammond »

hnfong wrote: post #159
nathanhammond wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

I did guess it was you; but wasn't sure. :P

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

#162

Post by dtm987654123 »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #80
ecshafer wrote: post #15

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…

>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.

Disagree slightly with this- pronouncing the tones individually and getting to the point where you can be understood isn't too hard (well still hard), but combining them when speaking more quickly is more challenging, especially if you want it to flow nicely, and adding emphasis while maintaining the tones. Not that it's mandatory if you just want to understand/be understood, it depends on one's goals.

It's a common misconception that it's enough just to learn the tones and move on and it's very hard to find teachers who are able to help with more advanced pronunciation

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

#163

Post by namelosw »

samus wrote: post #107
namelosw wrote: post #85

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…

> Also I see in the comment section people are worry about tones. I can guarantee tones are not particularly useful and you can communicate with native speakers with all the tones messed up and that’s perfectly fine. That might be true between native speakers of similar enough dialects who otherwise speak "properly" with each other: proper grammar, idiomatic expressions, predictable accents (also regarding tones, whi…

> If tones were completely irrelevant regarding understandably then they would have disappeared long ago.

Probably because it's a legacy and disappearing slowly? Modern Mandarin only has four tones left and has already lost tone patterns.

Do you know there's a "robot tone" in Chinese? It's simply swap every character to the flat or the first tone. Though it's under the stereotypical false assumption that robots have troubles with tones, kids in the late last century often communicated in that tone for fun without issues.

At the end of the day, vocal Chinese is always ambiguous with or without tones and in practice heavily relies on context. It requires written language to truly fix that.

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

#164

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

dtm987654123 wrote: post #162
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #80

Earlier 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…

>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. Disagree slightly with this- pronouncing the tones individually and getting to the point where you can be understood isn't too hard (well still hard), but combining them when speaking more quickly is more c…

I fully agree that a lot of the difficulty with the tones is in pronouncing them at pace, and in internalizing how they interact with one another.

However, this is still something that happens very early on when learning Chinese, and it takes nowhere near the same amount of invested time as learning thousands of vocabulary terms.

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

#165

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #157
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does actually get much more difficult to fix your accent as you improve in a language. You have to significantly regress, slowing down your speech and taking pains to say everything correctly. You can lock in a good accent early on with much less effort.

There's really no risk in having too good of an accent early on. People will assume you're more advanced than you are, but once you tell them you're learning, they'll simply be impressed by your lack of an accent. There are worse things that could happen.

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

#166

Post by ronyeh »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #152
ronyeh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 structur…

That’s also a great example. I’m gonna write these down so I can illustrate tones to my native English speaking friends.

You can also say “I DON’T KNOW!” in a 1-1-4 tone sequence.

Post reply on HN