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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

#91

Post by tianqi »

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…

Please allow me to share some of my views. I'm a native Mandarin speaker.

> I can guarantee that tones are not particularly useful and that you can communicate with native speakers with all the tones messed up, and that's perfectly fine.

Not at all. Tones are extremely important. If you have all the tones messed up, you can hardly communicate in Mandarin. It's true, as you said, that different regions of China have different dialects, and you'll find that people can communicate normally because: 1) The tonal differences in nearby regions are not too significant, and people can still try to understand based on context. And 2) In many cases, people switch to regular Mandarin when their dialects cannot communicate with each other. This is why Mandarin exists. It is an officially regulated dialect that all Chinese people learn, to solve the dialect problem among different regions. Chinese people may speak their own dialects at hometown, but when two Chinese people meet and find that their dialects cannot communicate, they immediately switch to Mandarin. Therefore, the tones in Mandarin are very important. To a considerable extent, Mandarin exists because of tones. You cannot communicate in it with messed up tones.

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

#92

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

About the tones not being as useful ... I think there are cases, in which they matter. Take for example 熊猫 and 胸毛: "有 xiongmao 吗？" "Are there Pandas? " or "Do you have chest hair?". Another one: 时间 and 事件. Sometimes it gets comical, but natives can and some will be confused, when your tones are off by too much, and the conversation just started, so that the context is not as narrowed down. Context is key in the language. You can notice that, when you are trying to join a conversation between natives. Until you understand a phrase or most of a phrase, that gives you a hint for the topic they are talking about, you will usually have a hard time understanding anything.

I just tried the tool and it couldn't properly recognize a very clearly pronounced "吃" and instead heard some shi2. I think it needs more training data or something. Or one needs a good mic.

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

#93

Post by zelphirkalt »

samiv wrote: post #88
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 point about being a beginner and having limited capacity to express oneself is an important point. When you can say more, you will also have learned more about the language's tendency to use words of 2 syllables, rather than 1 syllable words. Using 2 syllables instead of 1 already removes a lot of ambiguity, and people will understand you better.

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

#94

Post by zelphirkalt »

I think this is a good time for a shameless plug. The last 2 month or so I am working on my own project [1] for learning more characters. I have made a tool with powerful search function, training mode, and other useful features, such as displaying plots that show you your progress and whether you are reaching your daily training goal, and the ability to save searches, a la Thunderbird saved filters. It is written in Python and oldschool tkinter with custom widgets for a somewhat more modern and capable feel. It is very configurable. Though currently configuring it means touching a JSON file, as I have not yet bothered writing GUI for that.

I am mostly developing this for myself, to have the perfect tool for me, but I dare say, that I have not seen anything comparable and that I let my 10y+ experience in learning Chinese influence my design decisions. Oh, and it is free /libre software of course (AGPL). It comes with an ever improving vocabulary file that has tons of metadata about words, their usage, how to memorize them, etc. under ODbL (open database license).

[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/xiaolong-dictionary

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

#95

Post by snicky »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #80
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.

The tones are really not as difficult as people make them out to be. 90% of the effort in learning any language is just learning massive amounts of vocabulary. Things like tone and grammar are the very basics that you learn right at the beginning.‡ Beginners complain about them, but after a few months of studying Chinese, you should be fairly comfortable with the tones. Then, you spend years learning vocabulary. The…

> 2. The writing system, which because it's not phonetic requires essentially the same level of effort as learning an entirely new language (beyond spoken Chinese).

This is an interesting observation. Another one that I sometimes mention to my friends who didn't have an occasion to learn Chinese before is that in this language speaking, reading and writing are actually 3 separate components. You can read characters without knowing how to write them properly or even remembering them entirely. Lots of my Taiwanese acquaintances forget how to write certain characters, because nowadays most of the text they write is in bopomofo on their phones. Bopomofo represents sounds, so basically knowing how an expression sounds and being able to read the character (pick it from a set of given characters for the chosen sound) is enough to "write" it.

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

#96

Post by peterburkimsher »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #94

I think this is a good time for a shameless plug. The last 2 month or so I am working on my own project [1] for learning more characters. I have made a tool with powerful search function, training mode, and other useful features, such as displaying plots that show you your progress and whether you are reaching your daily training goal, and the ability to save searches, a la Thunderbird saved filters. It is written in…

Good to see that there are others learning and creating! Another shameless plug for my translator site: https://pingtype.github.io

It takes text, adds colours for tones, pinyin, literal, and parallel translations.

There’s also a character decomposition tool at the bottom of the page which can be helpful if you’re able to recognise half a character but can’t remember the pronunciation for typing it.

The YouTube channel has some song lyrics, movie subtitles, and audio Bible that might help with learning.

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

#97

Post by peterburkimsher »

jellojello wrote: post #2

This is amazing, if you feel like opening an entire language to being learned more easily.. Farsi is a VERY overlooked language, my wife/her family speak it but it's so difficult finding great language lessons (it's also called Persian/Dari)

I made a parallel literal translator for Farsi:

https://pingtype.github.io/farsi.html

Paste in some parallel text (e.g. Bible verses, movie subtitles, song lyrics) and read what Farsi you can on the first line, looking to the lower lines for clues if you get stuck.

The core version of Pingtype is for traditional Chinese, but it supports a few other languages too.

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