Mandarin courses with speech recognition

[marksealey]

My (original) wish was actually simpler.

(And thanks to all those here who have elaborated and clarified, amplified and guided.)

I am a complete beginner in Mandarin. Yet I have a few European languages under my belt. And long teaching experience; so hopefully I'm reasonably competent.

I just want a means whereby the accuracy particularly of my tones and those consonants and clusters which are markedly different from what I default to in (British) English can be judged.

The more I think about it, the more difficult I can see this (request) is: If/when mine are different from the native speakers, how exactly could software help me approach theirs, for example?

Just that I saw that such a feature apparently exists for Rosetta Stone.

I haven't really got into it yet; maybe it'll all be easier than I think.

Thanks again, everyone!

[davidj]

My view of chorusing is that it doesn't work. What happens is that you are surrounded by people who are:

- mispronouncing;

- speaking with an unnatural rhythm;

- speaking without any sentence level intonation,

and your teacher cannot hear your individual mistakes and nor can you.

(When I had some one to one tuition, I discovered just how important correct rhythm is, in particular pausing in the right places.)

To make any repeating system work, you need to be able to distinguish the different sounds from a native speaker. Even then, you won't necessarily know how to modify your articulation to produce the correct result; you really need a teacher that understands the mechanics of what you are doing wrong.

As to speach recognition. I think that speech synthesis is a better understood technology, and I doubt that a recognizer would fault a sythesized voice (except possibly by using sentence level statistics), and synthesized voices clearly sound wrong to human listeners.

My feeling is that consonants are the most difficult area for speech recognition.

Using a spectrogram from something like Audacity, probably is useful for getting tone and rhythm, but do not expect anything like the normal text book descriptions of tone patterns.