Bilingual native speaker here, got 0/3 of my attempts.
Hi, yes, unfortunately the classifier is not very good at the moment. We will work on improving it.
Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
141–150 of 187 posts
Re: Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a bit of an introvert I learned to read and type Mandarin before speaking. Just didn't talk to people, but absorbed what I saw in the cities I lived in. Reading menus led to signs led to comics led to books. In fact, my reading is still better than my speaking or listening skills.
Have you found much rewarding Chinese content? In terms of tv shows they don’t bother translating for the west and books/literature? I feel like there are so many great books in English where it probably wouldn’t provide much value to fully commit. But I’m a big fan of China and Chinese. I even watched a stupid Chinese soap opera about rural people moving to Shanghai and was totally fascinated by the lifestyle and gr…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_to_Survive is a good movie
Re: Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
#143Bilingual native speaker here, got 0/3 of my attempts.
Non-native speaker but probably tried 20 times? I had to force it to make it work. I'm very very sure I can do the first tone. Would love it if this thing did work reliably though. Also would be nice to have one Cantonese.
Hi, yes the classifier needs some improving. We expect that it would be much more difficult to make an accurate classifier for Cantonese, although we could make a website which presents Cantonese words/phrases and lets you see your (and the teacher's) pitch contour. Would that be of interest?
Re: Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
#144It's great to have a tool like this be available without any software installation. I remember when I first started having Chinese lessons, my teacher used some Windows-based software to show me visualisations like these. It helped a lot to know where I was going wrong. The visualisations here are the most useful part IMO, followed by the example sounds. If you're a native English speaker learning Mandarin: one tip f…
Hi, do you remember what the Windows-based software was called, by any chance? Was it PRAAT?
Re: Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
#145Helping mandarin learners practice the tones in their own time without the need for a private tutor to correct them. Record yourself speaking in-browser, and get instant feedback: pitch contour and what tone that sounded like. Any feedback welcome!
Quick problem, It seems to have a difficult time with deeper voices. Please fix. I do like it. Is there anything for whole sentences?
Hi, thanks for bringing that to our attention. We will work on it. We would like to work towards giving people feedback on whole sentences. We plan to work on 2-syllable words first.
Re: Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
#146I instinctively blocked access before reading the page because there was no way for me to read what the page was about before granting access -- and there still isn't, because it blocks scrolling or reading until microphone access is granted.
Thanks for the feedback! We now let you view the the page and only ask for microphone access when you press the 'record' button.
Re: Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
#147I haven't managed to get this working yet on my phone but: would it be possible for the same code to be used for the tones of other languages?
The website only works in Chrome or Opera at the moment - this may be what is causing you problems. Potentially yes - we are starting with Mandarin because it's such a popular language to learn. What other languages would you like to see?
Re: Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
#148I'm currently learning Mandarin. My strategy so far has been to take intensive classes with a private teacher (a professional from a language school), 2h every day I'm in town. Each course is 20 classes (i.e. 40h), and after 10 courses you're supposed to be reasonably conversational. Because I only take classes when I'm not out of town, and I'm constantly traveling, I've completed about 3 levels in 6 months. I've dec…
Based on my experience learning Japanese I'd say this is the perfect approach. In the early days, people should stay away from the written side of a language. As someone not in China but interested in learning, I'd prefer to try to understand what I'm hearing before working on tonal pronounciation. This is why I'd love and pay good money for a dataset of engaging Chinese tv shows, etc with the English translation and…
As someone who has learned Japanese and is currently going through Mandarin : the written stuff is super useful in the mid term. It’s the equivalent to learning Latin and Greek roots for English. It’s a vocabulary multiplier and let’s you find words yourself even when you hear them for the first time.
It might feel like an uphill battle but it helps a lot imo
Re: Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time. I am far more competent in written Japanese than spoken, both reading and writing it, essentially through understanding grammar. "Total waste of time" seems a harsh appraisal.
If you take two novices and dump one into arbitrarily extensive grammar lessons for 2 years, and the other into spending a couple hours per day listening (i.e. actively focusing attention on trying to understand what is being said) to the language for 2 years, at the end the first person won’t speak the language and the second person will. The first person is going to learn something , but it’s not an efficient use o…
with whatever minimal bootstrapping is necessary up front to start reading very basic material
That's how I started reading. Basic grammar, and some vocab. Vocab I didn't know was simple to look up; grammar I didn't know rendered the entire sentence incomprehensible and looking up the individual words did very little to help. If I knew the grammar but not the vocab, thirty seconds to comprehension. If I knew the vocab but not the grammar, order of magnitude more time to understand, often requiring assistance from someone else. Knowing the grammar felt like doing it on easy mode.
Not knowing the grammar rendered it a waste of time. THAT was the "total waste of time".
It was basically how it worked. "Here is some more reading to do, in order to comprehend it, here is some grammar that you will need." Literally front-loaded. My experience of effective learning is basically the complete opposite of what you advocated; no front-loading of grammar rendered it extraordinarily inefficient.
I dread to think how long even the basic sentence structure of "topic - comment" in Japanese would have taken me to realise if I'd had to learn it by just listening to people use it; like I'm meant to be some kind of linguistic detective. Telling me that before hearing the sentence spoken rendered it SO much more understandable, right from the start. I was able to start making valid, meaningful sentences in Japanese within sixty seconds. Topic - comment. Here's some nouns, here are some words that are like adjectives, here's how you mark the "topic" which you could think of as similar to the "subject" in English grammar, but go easy on that because the grammar is different, here's the copula, off you go.
Great work, that was a nice sixty seconds of comprehensible and correct Japanese, none of which you had ever heard before - you constructed it all yourself. Pretty good for someone who's been studying the language less than ten minutes. Here's the copula in the past tense, off you go with that.
My God, I genuinely flinch to think about how long that would have taken me without any front-loading of grammar. If I was meant to just guess how the language worked based on listening to it. What a waste of time that would be.
I reckon someone could listen to Japanese for a very long time before realising that some of the things that are kind of like adjectives can change depending on tense, but for some of them the copula changes. A native English speaker would have to really be good to spot that quickly. What a waste of time that would be compared to simply learning that piece of grammar.
Re: Show HN: Mandarin Tone Trainer – A ‘Helping Ear’ for Mandarin Pronunciation
#150Please do not block "using the website" until someone gives you access to the microphone. Simply make the parts of the page that rely on the microphone not work, and make it obvious they won't work until people give access to the devices you need access to. And in the mean time let them browse the page as normal, instead of force-hiding the content scroll bar and presenting a full screen overlay modal. If your page e…
Thanks for the feedback! We didn't realise this would pose such a problem. We've updated the website so it asks for microphone permission after people press the 'Record' button.
Not on my iPhone you haven’t