Rhinospike: Get a text read aloud by a native speaker

[chinopinyin]

http://rhinospike.com/ is a free website that allows you to submit a text. A native speaker will then read it aloud and you will be able to download an mp3 file with the read aloud text. It works on the "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" principle

Sounds quite interesting. Has anybody used it?

[gato]

Very interesting idea.

Here are some of the Mandarin and Cantonese clips recorded so far (text included):

http://rhinospike.com/language/cmn/recordings/

Mandarin clips

http://rhinospike.com/language/yue/recordings/

Cantonese clips

[waiguoren]

If this works out it will be incredibly useful...

[sebhk]

If you like rhinospike, I also recommend http://www.forvo.com/ which essentially uses the same principle, but focuses on words and short phrases rather than entire texts. So far pronunciations for more than 12,000 Mandarin and 2,000 Cantonese words have been made available on that site.

[hwangmic]

This is such a cool idea! I wonder how long of a post you can submit that they will still do the Chinese audio for. A site I've been using is http://www.clavisinica.com/voices.html. It's really helped my reading skills. Has anyone else tried to use Clavis Sinica before?

[mirgcire]

I gave rhinospike a try and found that there are hundreds of requests pending, and many of them are long. I listened to some of the recordings and many were quite good. I did submit a text and recorded one. But given the depth of the queue I haven't much hope. I like the concept, but there is room for improvement. For example, the length of the text should be factored into the assignment of priority. Also it would be nice to know the queue position of a request after you submit it.

I also tried forvo, but found the quality is really low. Most recordings were difficult to hear.

[Davis Lee]

rhinospike and forvo are both great ideas. but i believe there are also great speech synthesis resource out there. any one get any hint for this? especially those for language learners. Cheers,Dave.

[Hugh]

I think Rhinospike and Tatoeba will become extremely useful for language-learners. I can see Tatoeba coming out on top in the end though, as they're already taking a wider approach and looking to include recordings. What I like most is that Tatoeba lets you approach your target language from any other, whereas the majority of online learning content is aimed at native speakers of English.

[ChouDoufu]

It's maybe a bit different from Rhinospike, but...

I've been working on a website called Lingomi that let's you practice your listening skills. Audio is usually pretty high quality. There's also a feature that lets you turn a list of Chinese words into an mp3 file dictated by a native speaker.

Let me know what you think about it.

[waiguoren]

ChouDouFu,

I might be misunderstanding: is the idea of your site is to publish quality audio files of native speakers pronouncing the basic syllables of Mandarin? If so, I suspect every widely used introductory textbook has a complete section with exactly that material. I used Integrated Chinese when first starting out, and I think I learned the syllable+tone pairs quite well. I just obsessively imitated the audio CD that accompanies the textbook.

Rhinospike is intriguing because there will never be a textbook that contains every sentence you ever want to study. Instead of relying on my own fallible pronunciation when reviewing definitions and example sentences in Anki, I'd like to attach an audio file of a native speaker to each card. I'm just worried that they will botch the implementation...

[ChouDoufu]

waiguoren:

The purpose of my site is to offer tools to help with listening/pronunciation in Mandarin Chinese. It has quizzes and the ability to export personalized mp3s with almost any words you'd like.

Don't want to get too off topic though. I'll post about my site in more detail separately.

Rhinospike is an interesting idea, but I think it will always have an imbalance between sentences learners want and sentences native speakers record (especially for underrepresented languages).

[wrbt]

Hah! THat's a cool site thanks TS.