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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

#81

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #37
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.

The reason why Chinese people have difficulty pronouncing Indo-European languages is that Chinese has a very limited set of syllables, and they always follow the pattern (consonant) + vowel + (nasal/rhotic consonant), with possibly one of the consonants being dropped.

Chinese does not have clusters of consonants like "rst" in "first." The closest thing in Chinese phonology to "first" would be something like "fi-re-se-te." If you grow up never pronouncing consonant clusters, they are incredibly difficult to learn.

This is all related to the existence of tones, but tones are not the direct reason why Chinese people have difficulty pronouncing words like "first." Tone provides one additional way of differentiating syllables, so Chinese can get away with having far fewer syllables than non-tonal languages. You essentially get 4-5 different versions of every syllable.

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

#82

Post by thenthenthen »

cyberax wrote: post #19
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.

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.

Euro speaker here, no problem with recognising tones but speaking them…:/

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

#83

Post by siwatanejo »

memalign wrote: post #42

I wish this had a pinyin mode…! I am learning to speak Mandarin but I am not learning to read/write. ( I’m learning using a flashcards web app I made and continue to update with vocab I encounter or need: https://memalign.github.io/m/mandarin/cards/index.html )

+1 for pinyin

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

#84

Post by knocte »

siwatanejo wrote: post #83
memalign wrote: post #42

I wish this had a pinyin mode…! I am learning to speak Mandarin but I am not learning to read/write. ( I’m learning using a flashcards web app I made and continue to update with vocab I encounter or need: https://memalign.github.io/m/mandarin/cards/index.html )

+1 for pinyin

+1

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

#85

Post by namelosw »

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 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. Because as soon as you leave Beijing, you’ll find all the tones are shuffled because of every region has their own dialect and accents, which doesn’t stop people from communicate at all. So don’t let tone stuff slow your learning process down.

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

#86

Post by vjerancrnjak »

yunusabd wrote: post #73

Super nice, thanks for sharing! There's one thing that gave me pause: In the phrase 我想学中文 it identified "wén" as "guó". While my pronunciation isn't perfect, there's no way that what I said is closer to "guó" than to "wén". This indicates to me that the model learned word structures instead of tones here. "Zhōng guó" probably appears in the training data a lot, so the model has a bias towards recognizing that. - Edit…

I tried just repeating guó for as many times as symbols and repetition was not recognized.

Although I like the active aspect of the approach. Language apps where sound is the main form of learning should have a great advantage, as any written text just confuses as every country has its own spin on orthography. Even pinyin, despite making sense, for a beginner, has so many conflicting symbols.

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

#88

Post by samiv »

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…

As a person who lived in Taiwan and reached C1 in Chinese, I can also say that the tones are indeed less important than one might thing once one can say more and communicate more context. In the beginning when you're very limited in your expressive capacity and only can say simple sentences there's less context and getting the tones wrong does produce confusion.

"Because as soon as you leave Beijing, you’ll find all the tones are shuffled because of every region has their own dialect and accents, which doesn’t stop people from communicate at all. "

Isn't this in fact one of the reasons why China relies heavily on the written language because the different regions lose vocal communication ability as the changes in tones and pronounciations render the language understandable to people from other regions?

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

#89

Post by yunusabd »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #86
yunusabd wrote: post #73

Super nice, thanks for sharing! There's one thing that gave me pause: In the phrase 我想学中文 it identified "wén" as "guó". While my pronunciation isn't perfect, there's no way that what I said is closer to "guó" than to "wén". This indicates to me that the model learned word structures instead of tones here. "Zhōng guó" probably appears in the training data a lot, so the model has a bias towards recognizing that. - Edit…

I tried just repeating guó for as many times as symbols and repetition was not recognized. Although I like the active aspect of the approach. Language apps where sound is the main form of learning should have a great advantage, as any written text just confuses as every country has its own spin on orthography. Even pinyin, despite making sense, for a beginner, has so many conflicting symbols.

> I tried just repeating guó for as many times as symbols and repetition was not recognized.

Can you elaborate? I'm not sure I understand.

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

#90

Post by mijoharas »

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…

I feel like there is a commonly mentioned idea that "speaking a foreign language is easier after having a drink or two".

I've found that especially true with Mandarin because (I think) a beginner speaker is more likely to speak a little more quickly which allows the listener to essentially ignore the occasional incorrect or slightly mispronounced tone and understand the what theyî're trying to say.

(This is anecdotal, but with n>1. Discussed and observed with other Mandarin language learners)

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