Super interesting project. Curious about the data collection - did you record yourself, use existing datasets, or both? I've been thinking about building something similar for Hebrew vowels (which are often omitted in writing). Would love to hear what the hardest part of the pipeline was.
Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
101–110 of 166 posts
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#102Cool. Would love a write up about how you did it if you have time
+1 on wanting a writeup. The model architecture choices alone would be interesting - did they use a transformer, CNN, or something hybrid? And how they handled the tone pair ambiguities... Would read that blog post for sure.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#103I 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 channe…
Wow, the tool for decomposing characters is very cool! I assume you are talking about the thing that appears, when I click "Matrix"? I think it would be good to have "decompose characters" somewhere. But I might actually use this to get the component characters. In my app in my vocabulary file I also have tags for words, which are like "component:", so that if one knows how parts of a character, one could also search for it, without knowing its pinyin, by searching for "tags contain component1 and contain component2 and ...". I might add more component tags using your tool.
What I noticed though is, that some of the components don't seem to be like what I would expect to be shown as components. For example I tried the word 衣服 and 服 is shown to have the component "二". I guess one could see it that way, but some other dictionaries stop at 月 which itself is a component with set meaning (moon) and usage as radical (often for body parts). My favorite online normal dictionary for example: https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=... (hover over 3 dots of character and click the button with the 字 and scissors to see decomposition) says:
服 = 月 + 𠬝
𠬝 = 卩 + 又
A Chinese teacher told me there are various approaches for decomposition, so this might not be a science or that rigorous, but I think consistency would then dictate, that you decompose "二" as well. I don't always agree fully with their decomposition either and usually I stop at any component, that still has meaning by itself, which can be pretty low level 1 or 2 strokes components already. For determining that, I also use information from a language school, which I copied into a repo: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/language-learning/src/... "All radicals from their website". Also useful for memorizing the characters, if one can derive a mnemonic for a character from its components and their meaning.
The advanced UI looks very complex, but I don't mind that. In fact it is quite cool! Just has some stuff I don't even know what it is about. I noticed, that once one toggles the advanced UI, I didn't find a way to toggle it back to simple again.
Bookmarked!
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#104I 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 channe…
Also I just read some of your blog about learning Chinese :) Haha, I can totally relate to some of it. What I noticed is, that when I speak Mandarin with locals (on vacation, because I am not living there), they are always super happy, that I speak their language and they make an effort to speak it with me. This might be dependent on the region one is in. From your writing I would guess you might be in Taiwan or HK, and while I have been in HK, I have never been in Taiwan and I don't know how people handle it there. I have mostly been in southern China and it's always been great and an overwhelming amount of people were very friendly and welcoming. Of course living there and traveling there for a while are 2 different things and experience might differ. If you happen to visit Berlin, feel welcome to visit our Chinese language meetup (https://dragon-descendants.de/en/) and if you want you can ask for me, 小龙.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#105As a native speaker of Mandarin the demo it's not work for me. It can't check the pronounce of my voice. I don't know what's wrong of it, may be it's too sensitive(my daughter watch carton on my side).
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#106This is sick... you can just do things :D
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#107Impressive 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…
> 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.
That might be true between native speakers of similar enough dialects who otherwise speak "properly" with each other: proper grammar, idiomatic expressions, predictable accents (also regarding tones, which are not random, just different patterns from the standard). Language learners make errors in all these categories and there providing more motivation to neglect the tones is harmful. If tones were completely irrelevant regarding understandably then they would have disappeared long ago.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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."
Actually they kind of are. The tonal system of modern Chinese dialects developed from voiced initial constants of syllables. Old Chinese (Han dynasty and older) might not have been a tonal language altogether. Many linguists think that they developed from final consonants that have since disappeared, and before that happened, yes, Chinese would have had (some) consonant clusters. But still nothing like essentially free-form syllables like other language families.
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#109[deleted]
Re: Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
#110As a native speaker of Mandarin the demo it's not work for me. It can't check the pronounce of my voice. I don't know what's wrong of it, may be it's too sensitive(my daughter watch carton on my side).
It’s fairly sensitive to background noise at the moment. I’m planning to train an improved version with stronger data augmentation, including background noise.