Is it possible to turn off the male voice while retaining the ability to listen to the female voice? I find him intensely irritating to listen to.

Yeah, me too. I'd rather have no recording than listen to that drawling voice. Each recording is a tool to help us imitate the pronunciation of a native speaker, so they don't need to be spoken an abnormally slow pace. If a normal pace is too fast for someone to catch on the first go around, they can always play it again.

I completely agree; I find that his pronunciation of certain words isn't nearly clear enough for me to understand. For example, listen to the recording for the word,"黄河". In addition, there is now no recording for the word,"眼睛", just some microphone feedback. Any chance the Skritter team can fix this? I use Beta Skritter, by the way.

Also... When he says 称心如意, he says cheng with a 4th tone instead of chen with a 4th tone. I know lots of native speakers have trouble distinguishing between those two sounds, but Skritter is a teaching tool. All recordings should to be done in perfect Mandarin.

On a side note, I've found that in general, Chinese women are easier to understand than Chinese men. Has anyone else noticed this? My hypothesis is that women are more willing to replace their natural and "cool" dialect with "cute" mandarin and are perhaps less concerned with being cool and more concerned with being understood. It seems as if enunciating clearly is too cute for a lot of Chinese men, and they'd rather be manly men and shoot the shit in their local dialect.

I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just pointing out my observations. As an American from Wisconsin, I would hate it if someone asked me to speak with a southern accent, or a British accent.

I don't know. I like the new voice. Real people won't sound like any of the voices on here, but it's good to have some variety.

I think his voice is sexy. Just the thing I need to keep me studying harder and longer.

Feedback on the male voice has on the whole been more positive than negative, but next time I do a recording session I'll make sure that people say the words a little more quickly.

I understand why some people would want to have a male voice as well as female voices. But the man you have does not speak a standard form of Mandarin. Even I can hear that. I think it is important that you have recordings of men who do. We will be listening to the recording over and over while we are studying. While it may be important to understand people who speak "non standard" Mandarin, I do not think that we should be learning to speak it ourselves. Listening repeatedly to recordings of dialects opens users to learn to pronounce the words " way.

I couldn't tell what "standard" or "non-standard" Mandarin is, but to my mind the recordings are there to teach us pronounciation. They lack the context that make them useful for learning listening comprehension.

To that effect, a voice that's as clear as possible makes mimicking the sound easier. I do like having both the female and male voices in Pleco, but I understand it's not really feasible here. For my part, the female voice is just clearer and easier to to mimick.

@EJ: Can you give an example of a word he doesn't pronounce using putonghua? Personally I haven't come across one.