This is extremely cool, although I asked my wife (who is Chinese) to try it out and it said she made some mistakes.
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
#12When 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 given day.
I rather regret not emulating him, even though I haven't really used it for nearly 20 years and have forgotten most of it.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#13Longtime 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 up when speaking at normal conversational speed.
For example, if I say 他是我的朋友 at normal conversational speed, it will assign `de` to 我, sometimes it interprets that I didn't have the retroflexive in `shi` and renders it `si`. Listened back to make sure I said everything, the phonemes are there in the recording, but the UI displays the wrong phonemes and tones.
By contrast, if I speak slowly and really push each tone, the phonemes and tones all register correctly.
Also, is this taking into account tone transformation? Example, third tones (bottom out tone) tend to smoosh into a second tone (rising) when multiple third tones are spoken in a row. Sometimes the first tone influences the next tone slightly, etc.
Again, great initiative, but I think it needs a way to deal with speech that is conversationally spoken and maybe even slurred a bit due to the nature of conversational level speech.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#14When 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…
From a language learning standpoint that does make sense. Over-exageration while you are learning to help cement the idea, and then when you are speaking more naturally you will fall back into a regular kind of tone.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#15Anyone 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.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#16great work! I am going to try it out. Currently about to learn some Mandarin to be able to talk with hawker stand owners for a trip I am doing soon. I am trilingual and can speak a few languages on top of that, but none of them tonal. I am new to tonal languages and I find myself struggling with this... a lot!
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#17When 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…
This sounds like how solfeg training works. You use a hand signal to indicate a specific tone: do re mi fa so la ti
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#18great work! I am going to try it out. Currently about to learn some Mandarin to be able to talk with hawker stand owners for a trip I am doing soon. I am trilingual and can speak a few languages on top of that, but none of them tonal. I am new to tonal languages and I find myself struggling with this... a lot!
goof luck! I speak 6 languages fluent but none of them tonal and I find mandarin very challenging; it does not help that people in places where you might need it are not very forgiving; asking for green fork in a tea shop has people very bewildered.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#19Anyone 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.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#20When 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…
Hand motions help! Especially when you want to memorize new words, because initially you need to treat tone as something additional to remember.
I used simple index finger motions to mark tones.