Awesome idea!
Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
21–30 of 166 posts
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#22talk about 30 seconds to wow. great app, UX and demo. would love to use this. kudos.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#23Interesting application! A friend of mine built a model like this to help her make her voice more feminine, and it is neat to see a similar use case here.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#24it heard wu2 but i heard wo2 from you fine. and it should sound like wo2 not wo3 if spoken quickly. not a native speaker though so i could be wrong
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#25Anyone 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.
its critical because without proper tonal enunciation the words can be ambiguous.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#26Anyone 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.
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.
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Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#27When I was living in Taiwan, one of the ways I forced myself to remember to pronounce the tones distinctly was by waving my hand in front of me, tracing the arc of each character’s tone. It helped a lot even if I did look like an insane expat conducting an invisible orchestra. One more thing: there's quite a bit of variation in how regional accents in the mainland can affect tonal pronunciation. It might be worth rea…
In a university Mandarin class, one of the adult students (i.e. probably 40 or so) WAY over exaggerated his tones, to the point that the little old lady teaching us laughed out loud after one of his answers. A few years later, he had the most clean and consistent pronunciation out of anyone I'd been in a class with, and easily switched between the Beijing and other accents depending on which teacher we had on any giv…
that's EXACTLY how I taught myself to speak with a Spanish accent from Madrid. I repeated the way tv celebrities and the speakers on the metro announced the stations, and it gave me a base for how to use my mouth and throat appropriately. After a while I was able to tone it down and my accent got so good that locals couldn't tell I wasn't spanish - I had this cool party trick pulling out my id and showing them I was truly a foreigner!
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#28Anyone 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.
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 noticing how there were things in my native language (English) that used pitch information. 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.
The next part was just doing lots of practice with minimal pairs. Each time I would listen and try my best to work out where the pitch changed. This took quite a lot of time. I feel like massed practice (many hours in a day) helped me more than trying to do 10 minutes regularly. Try to hear them correctly, but don't try too hard. I didn't have any luck with trying harder to 'understand' what was going on. I liken it to trying to learn to see a new color. There isn't much conscious thought.
The final piece of the puzzle was learning phrases, not individual words, that had pitch changes. For example: "yudetamago" could be boiled egg or boiled grandchildren. Somehow my brain just had a much easier time latching on to multi-word phrases instead of single words. Listening to kaki (persimmon) vs kaki (oyster) again and again seemed much harder.
Of course, your mileage may vary with these techniques. I already spoke decent Japanese when I started doing this.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#29Neat. A personal tone trainer. Seriously, shut up and take my money now. Of course, it needs a vocabulary trainer, and zhuyin/traditional character support.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#30Amazingly I just did the same thing! Only with AISHELL. It needs work. I used the encoder from the Meta MMS model.