Amusing Pleco 儿化音 Audio

[陳德聰]

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I just had about 10 minutes of fun searching 活儿，玩儿，玩意儿，哪儿 etc by just going through the words containing 儿 suffix list... Just listening to the audio. Over and over and over.

Any ideas what is going on there? Could I have stumbled upon the reason foreigners learning Chinese have such a hard time? (That was a joke, do I maybe just have to redownload the voice files?)

[mikelove]

This is one of the many reasons we're moving away from stitched together syllable-by-syllable audio and towards text-to-speech. I'm guessing you're on Android, right? Go into Settings / Audio and turn on "use TTS if no recording" and that should get you better audio in these situations. (only reason we don't do that by default is that Google's TTS doesn't yet let us override its readings like Apple's does, so we can't reliably force it to play the correct syllable for 多音字 like 得)

[歐博思]

著, too.

[陳德聰]

I am more curious about why it comes out as "sing yit" or "wa hwar" and where that audio comes from in the first place, whereas one entry actually did "er" as I expected.

[mikelove]

That sounds like an issue with TTS, actually. Which version of iOS or Android are you running? (there was a bug in iOS 9.1 that caused Mandarin to be read as Cantonese, but it can be worked around in settings)

[陳德聰]

I'm using iOS 9.3.1, and I have the Cantonese pack, but the audio that I'm getting, now that you mention it, does sound kind of like Cantonese, but it is like a weird warped version.

I've attached a recording of what it sounds like when I click the Mandarin audio for 活儿. (Very obviously not Cantonese hahaha, but it cracks me up nonetheless)

Edit: whoops that's a lie, can't upload m4a files, hold up.

[mikelove]

Sometimes crops up in newer releases too; fix that works for most people:

 

Go into the system Settings app / General / Accessibility / VoiceOver / Speech, add "Chinese (China)" and "Chinese (Taiwan)" and "Chinese (Hong Kong)" as languages if they're not added already, then tap on the (i) button next to each of them in turn and make sure that the first "default" voice is the one checked. Then, reboot your iPhone and try audio in Pleco again.