How to make text to speech account for 儿化音

bao4li3

Member
Hello!

Long time user first time poster.

Is there a way to make Pleco's text to speech account for erhua yin in flashcard entries (I generally use the Qiang voice). Pleco is so awesome at generating pinyin for my sentence length audio cards and I usually just have to adjust some neutral tones and of course de/di and wei2 vs wei4.

I can't seem to find a way to make the text to speech accurately recognize/produce the "er" at the end of words.

Thanks for your help!
 

bao4li3

Member
I cycle between the Qiang (mâle) and Hong (female) voices. I think I've used both r and er. Is there a standard form that is supposed to work?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Ah, with those voices unfortunately we haven't found a good way to get them to do erhua when we supply them with pinyin (as we do with flashcards and dictionary entries) rather than characters (as we do in example sentences); with characters if they encounter
an erhua word they happen to have in their database like 一点儿 they seem to read it correctly but otherwise not.

We'll probably provide an option at some point to have the audio on a particular flashcard test played with characters rather than pinyin as a way of partially working around this, but unfortunately we probably won't have a 100% solution unless/until the vendor we licensed the voices from decides to support this.
 

bao4li3

Member
Not a problem! I'll keep using Pleco every day and loving every minute of it. It's the most (only) important app on my phone. Thank you for all your tireless work to provide this invaluable tool!
 

jurgen85

榜眼
In the meantime I have a suggestion:

Many examples have erhua in parentheses. Ignore those parentheses entirely (and the 儿 inside as well) before speaking it, otherwise it will make long pauses and say ÉR really slowly.

Just one example:

道 (OCC, noun 9):
画两条横道(儿), 一条斜道(儿)
 
Top