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I've learned to speak some Mandarin. What helped me a lot while talking is using Google's Translate function to see if I get the tone right. It's free and fast
by maartenpi_ 3y ago
I've learned to speak some Mandarin. What helped me a lot while talking is using Google's Translate function to see if I get the tone right.
It's free and fast. It's very helpful when you want quick feedback.
I learned a lot from it about the pronunciation of consonants as well. The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound.
I just came back from a trip to China and it was noticeable how much more people understood me. Still need to work on vocabulary though...
- xept 3y agoWhat Google's Translate function are you talking about? Voice input?
- lordnacho 3y agoWhen you look up a word there's a speaker icon that you press to hear the translated words.
- peterfirefly 3y ago> The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound. Well, if you are Dutch, all other consonants from all other languages need a lot more aspiration ;)
- oefrha 3y agoYou can even use Google Translate's text to speech API in whatever learning program you build for yourself: GET https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&tl=zh_CN&client=tw-ob&q=<url encoded text> This returns an audio/mpeg (mp3) response. Change the language code as appropriate. It's not the most natural sounding TTS engine, but it's free, unauthenticated and trivial to use.