Prononciation is my main problem

[Pampuk]

Bonjour,

My main problem at the moment, while speaking chinese is with tone : I now prononciation, but I'm never sure about tone, so I've got to read pinyin.

I could be great if a option exist to put accent not on pinyin but on the chinese character instead, so it give more confidence while reading chinese and allow to concentrate on Hanzi instead of pinyin.

I know it's an unusual representation, but I've got the idea from the Bible in hebrew where they put tone mark on top of character to allow people to sing it while reading it.

If it's not over complicated, I'll be happy if it could be implemented.

(if you want to have a look at bible's way of implemantation, I'll try to find a link)

Ok, thanks to google image find, I found one in 5 minutes :

http://www.aj6.org/jpbo/311/eg1b.jpg

tonal accent are on top and below character (don't consider point, there are voyels).

 

[mikelove]

We're actually looking at something along those lines for PlecoDict, an innovative new way to learn tones that a friend of mine came up with and is graciously letting us try out. I'm not sure if I should say any more in a public forum just yet, but you can look forward to seeing it in PlecoDict in a few months...

 

[MichaelK]

I have the same problem.

I can say things with the right tone, but when it comes to reading ...
it's a different part of the brain.

If there's a sound clip associated with the characters tone, it would be of tremendous help.

Not neccessarily the character itself, but a sample character sound clip with the same tone would be a good model.

thanx

 

[mikelove]

I get a lot of e-mails about this; basically the problem is that it's just too much work for now and there are features we consider higher-priority. We'd need 1600+ sound samples just to cover every Pinyin syllable in the dictionary, and a lot more if we want to do it correctly and properly alter the sound of the second character in a word etc. After the mistakes of version 2.0 we don't want to add another poorly-implemented feature and make people wait a year or more to see it working properly; if/when we do add sound clips we'll make them work well, be as accurate as we can reasonably get them, and probably add in some cool extra features like letting you quiz yourself on a flashcard list by automatically playing all of the words in it with an adjustable delay between them.

 

[MichaelK]

simple is good

I just mean. one sound clip for the first tone. One for the second. etc.

this would give you an idea of how to say one character and apply it to another. Like shi or something common. So the tones stick. (it's the 2nd and 3rd tones that get me. But sometimes I say an inproper 4th).

4 sound clips (optional) wouldn't be too bad.

 

[mikelove]

Well no, it wouldn't be too bad... in fact even offering pronunciation for those 1600 syllables would probably be doable. So the main question is whether or not we'll have the time to do this... I'll include some sort of status update with the 2.1 release e-mail (it should finally be ready sometime this week).

Honestly this sort of feature never seemed like much of a priority, since most people using our software are either taking Chinese classes (and hence have access to much better coaching on tones) or are actually in China and hearing them every day. But I suppose those aren't necessarily that helpful when you're trying to understand the subtle differences between sounds, sometimes it's useful to be able to hear something repeated a few dozen times over.

 

[cklab]

How about Prononciation on English

I have problem for English Prononciation....Will speech for english dictionary in future?

 

[mikelove]

It's unlikely we'd do that in our products anytime soon - we're pretty focused on people studying Chinese. And I don't think we could really offer much of anything new in the way of English language study aids; there are already thousands of other companies working on products in that area, and just about any feature you might be looking for is probably already available in a product somewhere. (there are numerous other programs for Palm that offer English pronunciation, for example)

 

[koreth]

We're actually looking at something along those lines for PlecoDict, an innovative new way to learn tones that a friend of mine came up with and is graciously letting us try out. I'm not sure if I should say any more in a public forum just yet, but you can look forward to seeing it in PlecoDict in a few months...

Did anything ever come of this?

 

[mikelove]

This was one of the many features in our original PlecoDict spec that didn't make it into the finished version. But it's not all that complicated to implement, so it should hopefully show up in a future release.

 

[glyntr]

Tone memorization feature

I was just wondering how that tone/pronunciation feature was going.
Are there any plans to include it in Pleco 2.0?
My biggest problem is tone memorization, and find that 90% of my flashcard time is spent trying to remember tones...

 

[lmcjipo]

After the mistakes of version 2.0 we don't want to add another poorly-implemented feature and make people wait a year or more to see it working properly;

Am I missing something here? Isn't the current version of PlecoDict v1.0.3?

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, that was referring to version 2.0 of our older Oxford Dict software, version 3.0 of which was rebranded as PlecoDict 1.0 both because we were adding several new dictionaries and because we completely rewrote it from the ground up. And per my earlier posting Oxford 2.0 had a lot of features (<cough>flashcards</cough>) that weren't very well implemented.

 

[sfrrr]

Re: Tone memorization feature

I was just wondering how that tone/pronunciation feature was going.
Are there any plans to include it in Pleco 2.0?
My biggest problem is tone memorization, and find that 90% of my flashcard time is spent trying to remember tones...

I think the most common problem in learning Chinese in the pronunciation. And, it seems to me, that non-Chinese focus on tones far too much. Find yourself some Chinese to listen too (my favorite is Chinesepod) so that you memorize the words by hearing them as words and as part of phrases. Then the tones will just be the music of the word.

I often find that I can't tell you what tones a word has until I pronounce it the way that feels right.

Everyone learns differently, but maybe this will help.

Also, check out the forums for Chinesepod (http://www.chinesepod.com/forum/). We frequently have long discussions about an element of pronunciation (or grammar or vocabulary or...). And, check out Sinosplice.com's Web pages on pronunciation. The are absolutely the best and most accurate of any on (and maybe off) the Web.

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

Sorry, didn't see glyntr's post there.

The pronuciation feature is basically done; we now have audio recordings from both male and female speakers for a TON of words, we're still waiting on a few corrections / re-recordings but it's definitely going to be in 2.0 and the only question now is how we're going to copy several hundred MB of audio recordings to someone's Palm. We will, of course, offer a reduced-size version that only includes single syllables, but we think that the multi-syllable words will really be helpful for learning tones, since tones don't always sound the same in multi-syllable words. Initially at least we'll probably just advise Palm users to buy an SD card reader and copy the data files that way; not ideal, but preferable to a multi-hour HotSync.

I agree with sfrrr about learning to pronounce tones, I never got them right until I stopped thinking about them, but for recognizing tones I do think audio recordings can be very helpful. If nothing else, they'll certainly help you determine which tones you have trouble distinguishing between, so that you can then go to a Chinese teacher or friend and get them to coach you on the difference.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

From Pampuk:

I could be great if a option exist to put accent not on pinyin but on the chinese character instead, so it give more confidence while reading chinese and allow to concentrate on Hanzi instead of pinyin.

From Mike:

We're actually looking at something along those lines for PlecoDict, an innovative new way to learn tones that a friend of mine came up with and is graciously letting us try out. I'm not sure if I should say any more in a public forum just yet, but you can look forward to seeing it in PlecoDict in a few months...

Mike, in this thread it seems that the focus of the original request "putting tone marks above characters to improve a person's abillity to learn and remember tones," shifted to a discussion about the audio files that you will be releasing with PlecoDict 2.0.

I am highly interested in the audio files, in the best quality that you will release them in, but I also want to state that I too have troubles with proper pronunciation of Chinese, especially when it comes to tones, and therefore am also interested in being able to select a button that would put tones marks above characters. This in fact is not a new concept, at least in book form, as some of the textbooks for the beginning and intermediate oral Chinese classes at Beida actually do this to aid in learning the proper tones of Chinese words.

So, I just want to say that I too am very interested in this feature, and I am wondering if you have made any progress on it and if we can expect to see it in 2.0 or in a later release of PlecoDict?

 

[mikelove]

We've made some progress on it, the main question now is one of performance. If we put tone marks on characters based simply on their most common pronunciation it should be plenty fast enough, but will often be inaccurate; if we segment the text into words and look up the pronunciation for each of those, it'll be a lot slower but be significantly more accurate. So the big question is whether we can get one of those options to be both accurate enough and fast enough to be useful in 2.0.

 

[gato]

if we segment the text into words and look up the pronunciation for each of those

Are you talking about segmenting text in the document reader? If it's for lookups, wouldn't a user input only one word at a time?

 

[mikelove]

This would be for the document reader, yes - putting syllables over the entire page of text. For simple lookups, people already have the entire Pinyin and don't need tone marks over characters.