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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 o
by dapangzi 8mo ago
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 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.
- tifan 8mo agoI had the same issue! Perhaps being another dapangzi is the problem here lol
- et-al 8mo agoI'm not familiar with this slang: what's a big plate?
- dirteater_ 8mo agothe commenter's username (i'm guessing they mean 大胖子, feel free to google translate)
- dapangzi 8mo agoThis is the correct. I was first called this by a Chinese classmate from Beijing with a biting sense of humor, when I was at university in Tokyo. We got on really well, to be clear. :) Hanging out with him was actually how I got started with Mandarin, probably why I chose this username.
- rahimnathwani 8mo agoI remember when first learning Mandarin coming across a phrase '你发福了' which literally compliments someone on blessings (i.e. having become more wealthy) but idiomatically means you gained weight.
- dapangzi 8mo agoI really like this one. It's delightfully cheeky. :)
- allan_s 8mo agoIt's a slang for somebody fat. 子 does not carry a specific meaning it is more a character with grammatical function to nominative
- dapangzi 8mo ago胖 (pàng) means fat, vs 盘 (pán), which means plate. Quite alright! We have to make mistakes to learn!
- sqs 8mo agoI don't think it takes care of tone transformation (eg 他是 ni3shi4 -> ni2shi4). Or if it does, my tones are just off. But it's a really cool idea!
- jhanschoo 8mo agoThe tone sandhi example you just gave looks incorrect to me
- jimz 8mo agoWell, OP wrote "he is" but then wrote "you are" in pinyin for one, and that's a bit hard to reconcile.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- carlmr 8mo ago他是 is tāshì which doesn't transform I think. Did you mean to write 你是 nǐshì? I think that transforms differently though. With the half 3rd tone only dropping. The classical example is 4/4 不是. Which goes bùshì -> búshì. Or 3/3 that becomes 2/3. E.g. 你好 nǐhǎo becoming níhǎo. The 1/4 -> 2/4 transformation I think is specific to one. 一个 yīgè becomes yígè.
- mercanlIl 8mo agoThe tool definitely needs to address tone transformations, it’s a big part of how the language is spoken. Otherwise it’s mostly useful for a first year student speaking in isolation. Hoping to see improvements in this area
- simedw 8mo agoThank for the great feedback! I have just added sandhi support, please let me know if it's working better.
- dapangzi 8mo agoACKing your comment. Will check once the TV is off in the house. :)
- dapangzi 8mo agoStill having some issues that match my previous comment, I'll try to follow your blog and give more feedback as you work on it. Will comment that the shorter phrases (2-4 characters long) were generally accurate at normal speed, but the longer sentences have issues. Maybe focusing on the accuracy of the smaller phrases and then scaling that might be a good way to go, since those smaller phrases are returning better accuracy. Again, really think this is a great initiative, want to see how it grows. :)