Regional Tone Variations

Will the option to edit the tone of a character ever be implemented? I know that similar questions and frustrations have been addressed here in the past, but adding the appropriate pinyin I intend to learn to the definition of a word is a process that hinders my ability to effectively study tones consistently (insofar as I hope to avoid all pinyin and definitions when focusing strictly on tone memorization).

If I could both edit a character’s tone and disable the audio so as to ensure that I only encounter the regional dialect that I hope to learn, the app would be more effective in helping me to study the language.

Are there any other alternatives that could currently be used to account for regional tone variations aside from adding a note to the definition of a character or word?

I believe it’s planned to allow editing pinyin just like you can edit a personal definition.

@SkritterJake Is this accurate?

After the pinyin is edited, will the audio follow suit? Currently, I’m putting my own pinyin in the mnemonic.

I’m not sure about audio following suit after pinyin would be edited, however @SkritterMichael has built a word level audio generator based on individual pronunciations so it might be possible!

It’s worth noting that audio for commonly studied words in Skritter are manually recorded by real people, so if there’s an option to change the pronunciation, we can’t guarantee that we have recordings for what you type. Like @Jeremy said, we could in theory stitch together audio based on what we have, but it will of course not be as good as audio recorded in full. Completely synthesised audio is not good enough to be used in educational contexts, so that’s not an option, at least not for now!

Unfortunately Jeremy misspoke about allowing custom edits to a vocab’s pinyin/reading. There are no current plans to add support for that. While we want to support things like a “Taiwanese pronunciation mode” or even other Chinese languages or dialects, it is not our focus in the short-term.

It’s not a perfect workaround, but in the meantime, you can disable your “auto-play audio” setting if you find it distracting, and write down your custom pronunciation in the definition area for a vocab.

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Thank you for the clarification.

Will there be any way to use tones based on a particular dictionary? The option to search for a character is available through a number of dictionaries like the ‘TW MOE’ dictionary.

If it’s a word like 喜歡, I just want to be able to type 3/1 without disrupting my study flow by having to type a separate set of tones that are irrelevant to the dialect that I am using. Including the tones I want to study in the definition is fine, but I still have to type the tones I don’t want to study if I want to get a correct answer. I can always double-back and tell the app that I didn’t actually forget the tone, but this is not conducive at all for those of us learning Taiwanese dialect.

It’s not so much that I want or expect a Taiwanese pronunciation mode, just that the process is made exponentially harder and arduous when there is no ability to independently make the necessary changes so that I might learn the dialect that I’m trying to learn. Editing the definition of every single character to reflect the tones that I want to learn without editing the input system’s acceptance of those tones makes very little sense with respect to the fact that the intention should be to avoid influence of any other dialects other than the one you intend to learn.

I can’t be the only one experiencing this frustration, it’s imperative for Taiwanese mandarin learners to be able to learn the tones that they hope to use when conversing with native speakers. If the focus of the platform is strictly on learning the standard Chinese dialect, that should be made clear. The option to use traditional characters and a Taiwanese dictionary are available, which I think might lead many users to believe that the option to learn the language based on the Taiwanese dialect would also be available.

The solution will be to include and support Taiwanese readings in the future (as a setting). It’s a big change to how our system currently works though and something that needs careful planning to deploy properly.