Have you guys given any thought about adding dictation especially for hearing tones? I think it would be very helpful.

If Scritter could get a tie-up with the people at www.aichinese.com to allow us to practice the pronunciation of each word as it comes up for review, that would be truly wonderful!

I was only thinking of improving the ability to recognize tones which might also improve the ability to produce them correctly.

There is freely available speech recognition software. The question is: how to you build something with it that just recognizes tones.

I keep thinking about how awesome it would be, but it's a lot of work, and every time I bring it up, I get only lukewarm interest. So I don't get to build it. Alas!

I was thinking of something very simple. Play the recording of a character or word and then show the pinyin, Very much like text, then definition.

@Dennis I have an Anki deck that does that for all 241 possible pinyin syllables, if you're interested.

James

James - I don't know if Dennis is but I certainly am! Haha.

me too! that would be so useful!!

Is it available on the shared decks?

By the way Dennis, I was browsing profiles and I tried to take a look at your site www.speakingofchinese.com but I got a 404. Is that the correct URL or is it just down for the moment? I'm curious to see!

You got the 404 because the site is all JSP. You need to add href.jsp to the URL as in www.speakingofchinese.com/href.jsp. A lame excuse I know. Adding index.html doesn't work for some reason that I've forgotten and haven't fixed.. Something to do with a conflict. At any rate, it's not done. I keep putting off doing the grunt work of adding content.

It's on Google App Engine which I believe you use.

Whoever wants a copy, send me a message (click on my user id and go to "Message"). It's like 21 megs though; we'll have to figure out some way to pass it around.

You might to use one of the free cloud services to make your file available. Like these:

http://techsplurge.com/910/top-5-free-cloud-storage-options/

I just tried MS SkyDrive which might be the easiest to use since it's integrated with Explorer. I tried DropBox but it required you to put all your files/folders in folder named DropBox

I found this page on the web which illustrates all possible putonghua (Manadarin) syllables with sound and an animated tone graphs.

www.learnchineseabc.com/chinese-pinyin-syllable-chart-d.htm

and a similar site here:

http://www.language.berkeley.edu/ss/

and finally tone drills:

http://www.shufawest.us/language/dual-tonedrill.html