DEVELOPING A CHINESE LANGUAGE TONE TRAINING APP UTILIZING PITCH DETECTION

Presenter(s)

William Hubbard

Abstract or Description

DEVELOPING A CHINESE LANGUAGE TONE TRAINING APP UTILIZING PITCH DETECTION

William Hubbard

People learning to speak Mandarin Chinese often find mastering the pitch of their voice to be enormously challenging. Chinese is a tonal language, meaning the definition of a word is determined not only by consonants and vowels, as in non-tonal languages, but also by the pitch at which the word is said. Because of this, if a learner of Chinese makes tone mistakes while speaking, a native speaker will be unable to understand what they are saying. One of the best methods for tone practice is working with a pronunciation coach, but this is not feasible for many people because of monetary and time constraints. I seek to combat this issue by developing a Chinese language tone training app. The goal of this project is to create an application that will listen to a Chinese language learner attempting to speak a sentence or word and then give visual feedback informing the user of how to improve. To accomplish this, I am utilizing Python because it easily processes audio and is compatible with statistical libraries that will help me create understandable feedback for the user. The first sub-goal of this project is to create a program that can train a learner to correctly pronounce 妈 (mā; first tone ma; means mother) and 马 (mǎ; third tone ma; means horse). Thus far, the program can successfully train users on 妈 (mā; first tone ma; means mother), and future efforts will be directed towards incorporating 马 (mǎ; third tone ma; means horse) into the program’s library. The overall purpose of this app is to create a more interconnected world by easing the process of learning to speak Mandarin Chinese.

Mentor

Dr. Elliott