If it's not in your list of feature requests already, I would like to requests this. There are subtle differences in how men and women pronounce the same characters and words and I know I'm not the only one who has developed an effeminate tone due to only studying from female voices.

I agree with this, the male pronunciations seem to make up about 0.1% of the total. It would be really nice if there were both a male and female for each one, and it would alternate between them on different occasions.

I was hoping or something more along the lines an option under Settings (in the app itself). The option would allow you to choose between male only, female only and mixed.

I think this is a priority request as well. For those of us who aren't musically talented, having to adjust the pitch when repeating a syllable makes accurate reproduction all the more difficult.

Agree.

'Subtle differences'? 'Effeminate tone?'

Could you be a bit more specific about this?

@LaughingHorseman

Males who study Chinese primarily using females as an example of natural speech tend to have effeminate language mannerisms - vocabulary, intonation, etc.

I wouldn't expect it to occur due strictly to single and double syllable recordings, but I suppose it's possible. In my observations it's most common with guys that practice their Chinese mostly with local girlfriends.

@ Icebear. Thanks for your reply. Still, as a musician I have a distinct preference for female voices -- Chinese or otherwise :-D.

icebear "Males who study Chinese primarily using females as an example of natural speech tend to have effeminate language mannerisms - vocabulary, intonation, etc. "

讨厌！

I do notice that foreigners tend to speak Chinese quite effeminately...

cdavaz, I don't think hearing male over female voices on Skritter will make much difference, though. Still, I would probably select male voices if it were an option.

Get on livemocha or QQ and speak with some Chinese men once and a while - it's pretty simple to see what you should and shouldn't do in terms of pronunciation.

I don't think that it's necessary (or high priority) to practice all words all the time with a male voice. Pinyin works wonderfully as a system of transcription and once you're comfortable with it (Chinese only has a few hundred possible syllables after all) the audio becomes superfluous.

As a female this problem doesn't affect me, but I can see that there would be a need for male voices. I don't agree that the audio becomes superfluous once you learn pinyin; hearing the word pronounced definitely drills it into my head better than just reading the pinyin.

@icebear

You are right, it mostly comes from studying from Chinese girls themselves. I am now trying to actively rectify the situation though.

@LaughingHorseman

I also have a reference for female voices, and even female company. I do not prefer however to produce female speech patterns.

@WoodenFrogs

Hearing the same pinyin pronounced a certain way over and over again certainly influences how you will reproduce the same speech. Speaking fluently is not a conscious, intellectual activity (i.e., when you speak fluently you don't think about how you should say something, you just say it).

I do agree that being around Chinese girls can lead you to having a feminine way of talking.

I picked up the exclamation 哦哟！from my students, and would say it pretty frequently. But one of my friends asked me why I say it, and he told me it was a girl thing to say.

Not sure how applicable that is to the rest of China - it could be a regional thing. But I thought it was kind of funny.

I also support this feature request.

Don't have anything else say than that.

Just to jump in, I support it too. Would be great! But very thankful for the work that is being put into the app now and simply all the other awesome features of skritter. : )

I had a male colleague who told me my Chinese sounded affected because I used the tongue curl for sh, ch, zh. He didn't explain why. Some thing to do with Beijing? It seems people from Taiwan don't bother with it.

Hey Dennis, can you describe what you mean by a tongue curl for sh, ch, zh?

How to curl. ;-) You pull your tongue back and curl it upward toward the hard palate. ( What's that? It's the roof of the mouth behind the ridge behind your upper teeth. If you curl your tongue too far, you'll find the soft palate. Don't do that.) For ch and zh the tongue is pushed forward as you pronounce ch or zh. For sh you keep it curled. They sound a bit like sh, ch and zh in English. They are part of standard Chinese. Not all Chinese speakers use the tongue curl. They just use z, c, and s. The letters I've used are pinyin.

A picture would have been much easier to explain the tongue curl, but I couldn't find one. When I don't need one they are all over the place.

Listen to the announcers on Chinese TV who for the most part speak standard Chinese.

There's a funny article with commentary called "On Accents and Perceived Fluency". I came across it when I was looking around for something about sounding female when speaking Chinese. It's at:

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2007/05/25/on-accents-and-perceived-fluency

@atdlouis,

hereafter a link to an article from John Pasden on the pronunciation and the position of the tongue (including drawings) I had never heard of the tongue curl before and it has helped me a lot to improve my pronunciation.


http://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/pronunciation-of-mandarin-chinese

@marleendemol

I think I first encountered the term "tongue curl" in "New Practical Chinese Reader" in Lesson 3 or maybe it was the previous version, "Practical Chinese Reader". At any rate I was just trying to describe it.

I thought John Pasden sounded familiar. I see he is part of ChinesePod with which I experimented.

As to symbols and pronunciation, I believe that something like IPA or bopomofo might be better used to teach Chinese pronunciation. My first French teacher made our class write French in IPA for the first semester. She believed that seeing French written in the Latin alphabet would skew our pronunciation toward English.

If this is true, using the Latin alphabet to represent Chinese sounds for people learning Chinese may also cause problems with their Chinese pronunciation. I wonder if pinyin was even meant to be used to teach Chinese pronunciation to non-Chinese speakers.

I don't doubt there are articles on this somewhere on the Internet.