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mikevwilliams -

I may have found the problem people have been having, at least i've managed to get the program to
work on my own computer when it didn't before. I think this may have to do with the Unicode
settings for your computer. Mine is set to run non-unicode programs as Chinese. In the shortcut
for SpeakGoodChinese, I changed the Current Code Page, under the Options tab in the shortcut
properties to United States, and now the program works. By the way, I am using the latest beta
from August, so I haven't tried any other versions but it could be the solution to everyone's
Windows problems.



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Skinkie -

Mike if this is the problem, we really owe you something!










imron -

If that's the case, you might also want to try using AppLocale, which should achieve the same
results without needing to restart your machine, or change the default settings (which might be
problematic for those users who need the default settings to be some other language).










Skinkie -

Maybe it has something to do with me not providing all locales... I wonder if this is so.










Czech Cara -

Hi all, is there anyone who tried a new tone recognition speech program on
http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=main , the link only appears when you first open
the site.??? I failed to install it... Thanks










newyorkeric -

There is a thread about the software and installation issues here:

http://www. /showthread.php?t=18867










roddy -

Merged the two topics.

The change suggested by mikevwilliams above seems to fix the problem - I haven't had a chance to
actually use it yet (will wake people up and get into trouble if I start shouting into the
computer now) but it's getting to the GUI and all looks well.

Detailed instructions for anyone who still hasn't got it working, and skinkie if he wants to copy
and paste it to the programs webpage.

Find the /speakgoodchinese folder
Right click on the sgc.bat file
Properties
Options
Set current code page to United States.

Incidentally, I didn't need to restart.










mikevwilliams -

Skinkie,

Is there any way of you providing a fix for this problem with the program itself. I ask this
because I am running Vista now, and I can't change the Current Code Page like I could when I was
using XP. I would really like to try this program out, but I can't make it work in Vista unless I
change the non-unicode program setting back to english instead of chinese.

Thanks










Skinkie -

I still did not (have the time to) find out which thing is broken (or better to say: missing) that
causes this crash and is fixed with this locale change. A long shot would be getting this program
to work with the GTK+ win32 installer.

...I don't know if you have the 'skills' to look how to do this.










SGC_Rob -

Hi,

I am the one responsible for the recognizer and tone models.



Quote:

Detailed instructions for anyone who still hasn't got it working, and skinkie if he wants to copy
and paste it to the programs webpage.

Find the /speakgoodchinese folder
Right click on the sgc.bat file
Properties
Options
Set current code page to United States.

I have put this workaround on the download page.
http://www.speakgoodchinese.org/download.html

Thanks



Quote:

Does the program test absolute levels as well as relative levels? That is, does it test that my
2nd tone rises high enough or that my 4th tone falls low enough? Or is it testing that my 4th tone
falls enough relative to the starting point?

Yes. SGC compares the overall pitch (top) of the correct tone model to the pitch of the utterance.
If the test utterance is more than 3 semitones below or 6 semitones above the model tones, it is
discarded. Then the ranges of the tones (rises/falls) are compared. With the same cut-offs. Only
then is the tone recognized. The recognizer too does use the shape and extend of the rises and
falls.



Quote:

I read somewhere in the documentation that the program is generous with regards to giving correct
responses so as not to discourage new learners. In future versions it would be helpful if the user
could choose the tolerance level.

Actually, you can by setting switches in the scripts. But you wouldn't want to.

The short reason is, the student should get the benefit of the doubt. A longer reason is that the
recognizer type (Dynamic Time Warping on model contours) is much more likely to falsely reject a
correct tone than to falsely accept an incorrect tone.

We managed to get both equal (the optimum solution) at around 15% for actual use data. This error
rate is rather high for single bi-syllabic words, but building recognizers for beginning language
learners is still an unsolved problem (for read "typical words" by native speakers we got below
5%, a meaningless statistics).

The tuning is done in two ways. First, SGC will pick the correct tone if it is close enough to the
best (incorrect) solution. Second, many confusions which are part of Mandarin assimilations tend
to remove the differences between tones in certain contexts (eg, tones 2 and 3 in the context of
another 2 or 3). We just consider the utterance correct if the recognizer picks the wrong tone of
a confusionable pair (eg, if 2-3 is recognized as 2-2).

These rules can be found in SpeakGoodChinese/SGC_ToneProt/SGC_ToneProt.praat
Look for:
# Special cases

However, if someone knows more about chinese tone assimilation/coarticulation phenomena, please
feel free to point out our mistakes. We really are NOT well informed in the phonetics of Mandarin.
Especially the neutral tone proved to be an enigma (however, we alread contacted Yiya Chen).

Btw, we also worked on a pronunciation recognizer. That proved to be much more difficult and the
end result was so bad and the project time so short that we stopped that. It is still open to
development, though.

Rob van Son












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