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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

#31

Post by ChadNauseam »

This is amazing. I'm also working on free language learning tech. (I have some SOTA NLP models on huggingface and a free app.) I have some SOTA NLP models on huggingface and a free app. My most recent research is a list of every phrase [0].

Pronunciation correction is an insanely underdeveloped field. Hit me up via email/twitter/discord (my bio) if you're interested in collabing.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/anchpop/acbfb6599ce8c273cc89c7d1bb36...

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

#34

Post by danparsonson »

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.

Wholeheartedly (or maybe downheartedly?) agree with this - sometimes I try to say the simplest things and people just stare at me like I'm speaking Martian. Which I suppose I might as well be! One of my big problems is implicit use of tones for things like expressing uncertainty; that's a very difficult habit to get out of.

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

#37

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

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.

Agree. It’s really hard. It also explains why a lot of people born in China tend to make serious pronunciation errors when speaking English or German. They are used to focus on different things than us westerners.

It took me very long time to really understand how impersonating tone is in Chinese.

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

#38

Post by tifan »

Well, it would work only when I speak word by word, not as a sentence or in a normal speed for daily conversations. The model thinks I was making mistakes when I speak casually (as a native Chinese speaker, I had Mandarin 2A certification, which is required for teachers or other occupations that requires a very high degree of Mandarin accuracy). You wouldn’t really notice it but language pronunciations is very different between causal and formal speech…

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

#39

Post by rablackburn »

> And if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last decade, it’s the bitter lesson: when you have enough data and compute, learned representations usually beat carefully hand-tuned systems.

There are still holdouts!

Come back to me in a couple of decades when the trove of humanity's data has been pored over and drifted further out of sync with (verifiable) reality.

Hand-tuning is the only way to make progress when you've hit a domain's limits. Go deep and have fun.

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

#40

Post by tifan »

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…

I had the same issue! Perhaps being another dapangzi is the problem here lol
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