posted by Noah.Pflugradt on July 22, 2012 | 13 comments
Hello,

I’ve written a little tool to help with training the Chinese pronouncation. What it does is pretty simple: It grabs a sentence from Popup Chinese, plays it to your speakers, records you saying the same sentence and then plays both the original and your version back to you.

Additionally it does a pitch analysis using PRAAT which shows you how you managed to pronounce the tones. And it keeps track of the sentences for you. It’s a very quick and easy way to really make progress on your pronouncation.

I’ve put up a few screenshots here:

http://randomengineering.wordpress.com/

Right now it’s only two weeks old and in a pretty early stage of development. So before making it public I’d like to run a closed beta for a couple of weeks.

If you are interested in the tool, have time to actually use it and if you are premium Popup Chinese subscriber, leave me a comment on the blog post and I’ll email you a dropbox link with the program.

What you need to use it is a PC with Windows, .Net 4.0 installed and a microphone.

Best, Noah

PS: The program and this closed beta is David-Approved(tm), meaning I talked to him first about it to make sure it doesn’t violate any rules :-)

PPS: If you prefer not leaving your email here, you can also email me at mandarinspeechtrainer [at] gmail.com
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craigrut on July 23, 2012 | reply
I'm in. My pronunciation is terrible cause nobody corrects it and I would love to have a way to fix it myself.

Craig
trevelyan on July 25, 2012 | reply
Bump. Anyone interested can get in touch with Noah, or let us know and we'll pass along your contact info.
Brendan on July 29, 2012 | reply
What an awesome idea! Mac-only here, so I can't join the beta, but I'll be recommending it to people -- I'm a big believer in 正音 through recording. Would've loved to have PRAAT and something like this years ago!
Noah.Pflugradt on July 29, 2012 | reply
Thanks for the bump and the kind words!
bretter23 on July 29, 2012 | reply
I'd like to beta test this software. I have a MacBook that runs Windows Vista. My email address is bretter23@yahoo.com.

Thanks,

Brett

Noah.Pflugradt on July 29, 2012 | reply
Email sent. Thanks for your help!
slatkin on July 29, 2012 | reply
I would like to volunteer. I work for a software company and have done beta testing before so hopefully I can provide good feedback too :)

slatkin@gmail.com
Noah.Pflugradt on July 29, 2012 | reply
Email sent. Thanks for your help!
craigrut on July 30, 2012 | reply
@Noah

So far this has been a lot of fun to test and help out with. Thanks for your help in improving it and providing a way for us to improve our pronunciation on our own!

Craig
armour.matthew on August 1, 2012 | reply
Hi Noah,

I'd like to test this - sounds great. My email address is [my username] at gmail.com. Thanks!
Noah.Pflugradt on August 1, 2012 | reply
Email sent. :-)
Noah.Pflugradt on August 5, 2012 | reply
Up to version 1.6 now. The app is slowly getting less bad!

Big thanks to everyone that wrote to me!

@Betatesters: The zip file is in the dropbox folder if you'd like to test the current version.
craigrut on August 5, 2012 | reply
Big thanks to you for keeping on it and taking it into account :).