Lingt (SRS learning with voice recognition)

[chinopinyin]

I have just found Lingt http://lingt.com/ through http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/20/lingt-learn-chinese/

The program (still in beta) is meant to help you learn vocabulary using wordlists from Lingt, textbooks or the ones you may create. In this respect, there are already other SRS programs available, such as ZDT or Anki, but this one has one nice feature. It adds voice recognition technology.

Does anybody have experience with Lingt?

[roddy]

Ah, MIT's speech recognition again. That technology has popped up a few times - here and there. Someone (not me, I'm far too busy today ) should have a play with this, at some point someone's going to get speech recognition for Chinese learners working and it's going to be great.

[Prodigal Son]

This is really cool. Thanks for posting it

[hanyu_xuesheng]

Lingt is (for me) a rather boring cramming system.

If you really want to acquire Chinese, with real texts, use LingQ http://lingq.com

[imron]

Would you care to elaborate a bit more on their differences? I'm sure many readers would be interested in the reasons why you think one is better than the other.

[roddy]

And how was the speech recognition - that's the important thing. If someone actually gets that working (and I'm kind of sceptical, voice recognition on native languages is tricky enough) it's going to be like Skritter in your mouth.

[Hobbes828]

Skritter in your mouth...... haha.......

[justincannon]

Justin from Lingt here. Thanks for taking a look at our application. Our beta is still rough around the edges, but we're responding to feedback and improving every day.

The voice recognition, as someone pointed out, isn't home cooked by us. It's actually a terrific project by the Spoken Language Systems people at MIT (our alma mater). We only incorporated it because of how impressed we were with how well it did it's job. It's not perfect and sometimes gets caught on certain words (which is why we make it optional), but it recognizes my Chinese 90-95 percent of the time.

So to answer Roddy - the technology is still getting there, but it's far enough along that it can provide a really great learning experience (at least for me).

[Chris333]

Just as a data point- I've been using Lingt for a few days and feel it is beneficial from a raw vocabulary point of view. I'm actually surprised to see it's still in beta...over a year.

Anyone care to share impressions of this tool? I like it for the way it teaches, forcing me to learn the tones by typing them. I don't like the speed at which I learn but I guess it's based on some algorithm which estimates when you will forget the word and make you study it at that time. This results in slower progress than I'd like but maybe it's a good way to learn.

BTW; I have no affiliation with this site. I got an invitation from a friend last week and decided to try it. I also just joined this forum and wanted to see if anyone else here is using it.

-Chris

[chinopinyin]

@Chris333

I've been using lingt for a while and see it as a highly valuable tool

There are some things that could be improved, though. It would be very useful if they added sentences and sentence tone and voice recognition ( It is so unnatural to learn words in isolation!). More feedback on mistakes would also be helpful.

Another interesting tool with voice recognition is http://www.qoocochinese.com, which contains sentences and provides more feedback. Its main drawbacks are the somewhat slow speed and the fact that there are no textbook based exercices.

Does anybody know additional websites with useful tone and voice recognition?

[Chris333]

According to their 'About' page, they do have in-browser voice recognition. I haven't tried it because I don't have a microphone enabled on my computer.

http://lingt.com/about/

Sentences or longer word groups would be nice, but I think Lingt is primarily a vocabulary learning tool. It would be helpful to learn words in the context of a sentence though.

[chinopinyin]

Lingt has voice recognition, although it only recognises isolated words.

If you are not using a mike, you may also want to try http://smart.fm/. If you also prefer to be offline, ZDT or Anki are to be recommended.

[PublicNudity]

I've been using Lingt every day for over two months now. I don't use the voice recognition, since I lived in China and know how to pronounce already. It is obviously useful enough that I use it everyday, however I have some peeves that I hope they will work out:

It doesn't test your level before you start, so everyone must start on level 1, and somehow repeat words many, many times over many days before it will unlock the next list. I figured out I can get around this by adding my own vocab lists.

The FAQ does not expain how any of the scoring works. I have asked the helpline, and they couldn't answer. There are a lot of stats that mean nothing to me.

There are lots of errors in the pinyin, both spelling and tones. I myself have entered quite a few mistakes, because as soon as you click enter, you can't go back and fix a typo. Also, if you enter a word that someone else has already defined the pinyin for, you can't fix it. For example, the pinyin for "Argentina" is "-1". Thus the vocabulary is getting more and more "dirty". I have asked how I can fix this, but again no answer.

Many characters have more than one pronunciation and definition, and most of these are listed as an option, but for some words I would like to be able to add an unlisted pronunciation, but users cannot do this.

They have no user forum to ask questions, which would be very handy given that the FAQ is useless.