LTL Flexi Pronounciation Trainer (Mandarin)

We have our pronounciation trainer for Intro, HSK 1 and HSK 2 online now.

You can find the link in each topic under “Additional Resources” too.
This thread is for feedback, issues or suggestions for improvement.

What do you guys think, is this useful? Does it help your studying? Anything that could or should be changed or improved? Any issues or problems you encountered when studying?

All feedback (constructive, bad or good) most welcome. We need to decide if we want to continue this for higher levels and also extend to other languages, but first would like to hear some feedback.

And of course a big thank you to @Ben-Mandarin-HSK_5 who created the underlying technology for this as discussed in this thread.

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I think especially in the beginning it’s important to build a good base of pronunciation skills, so thumbs up. Just tried it out and am not a fan that it’s only available for Chrome and Edge… however, it seemed to work great when sometimes I used the wrong tone (I said 又 not 有)… when at other times I used the wrong tone and it didn’t notice (used the third tone instead of the fourth tone for 可爱.

It would be interesting to know if it’s also registering the difference of ch/zh - sh/x and so one as I think a lot of beginners are having problems there.

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I’m looking forward to using it with HSK 5 lessons. I would definitely use it before and after each lesson to review the vocabulary.

Thanks for working on it!

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I agree that the trainer is only as good as the browser support for the Speech API standard. Right now only a few browsers including Google Chrome seem to have a decent support for it: Speech Recognition API | Can I use... Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc

Apple especially is a bit behind and doesn’t offer a reliable way to recognize speech in Safari yet, although they started working on it. Next year, maybe?

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Great observations regarding the tones! Speech recognition engines are primarily designed to figure out what the user meant so they can sometimes be a bit forgiving. However, if they cannot understand the input, chances are that a native speaker won’t understand either (and vice versa if they can).

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it is a good support for practicing speaking and hearing our pronunciation of tones. I think it would be nice to add a recording of a Chinese teacher, to improve our pronunciation and our listening to the language. (I don’t know if it’s possible to do it, but it’s just a suggestion) :smiley:

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Hi @Eva-Mandarin-HSK_1
In front of the sentences there is a little loudspeaker, there you can listen to a Chinese voice.
But I recommend to speak much slower and concentrate on the tones :wink:

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Ah, had ofc no idea about the technical background but then in makes complete sense to use these browsers.

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Hi ! I did not see it thank you so much ! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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