Free Online Pinyin Refinement Tool

The Pinyin Tutor is an online tool to help Chinese learners improve phonological perception in Chinese and refine the Pinyin spelling skills. It is widely known that Chinese phonological system is not easy for learners. One great difficulty is tone perception. It is also easy to confuse the various initial sounds and some of the vowels are difficult to distinguish. Therefore, the Pinyin tutor is created in attempting to help learners recognize the relevant phonemic categories.

The tutor refines students' phonological perception through a series of dictation tasks. After hearing the sound of a Chinese word, the student types out its Pinyin spelling. One remarkable feature of the Pinyin tutor is that it allows students to directly compare the target sound and the sound of spelling they have typed. In addition, the tutor also provides instant explicit feedback when errors occur. It is exceedingly difficult for teachers to provide this type of phonetic training, detailed sound input and verbal feedback to students in classroom. As a result, the Pinyin tutor can be a valuable supplementary tool for students to sharpen Chinese listening skills outside classroom.

The Pinyin Tutor is created from a research project supported by the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Centre. At our request, the developers have added all the words in New Practical Chinese Reader 1 to their database specifically for the students in our programme at the U.N. Words in New Practical Chinese Reader II are being uploaded. If you are interested in using the service to improve your pronunciation, please visit http://www.talkbank.org/pslc/col/PT/UN1/. You will be asked to create an ID. Please see below for instructions about how to create an ID and use the product.

How to Use the Pinyin Tutor

Registering an ID

To use the Pinyin Tutor, you must first create and register your own ID. Your ID can be some simple noun “apple” or “tiger”. You must use this ID consistently in all the Pinyin Tutor training sessions. If you use the wrong ID, you will not receive credit for the session. If you forget your ID, you can always retrieve it by clicking the button “I forgot my ID”. The ID will be emailed to you instantly.

Hardware and Software

The Pinyin Tutor depends on Flash Player. If you don’t have Flash Player installed in your computer, the system will prompt you to download the free Flash Player and install it.

The Pinyin Tutor is basically an online dictation tool. So please remember to turn on the volume of your computer before you start doing Pinyin exercises.

How to Enter Pinyin

· Use numbers (1, 2, 3, 4) for the four tones. For example, “tóngxué” would be written as “tong2xue2”.

· Use number 5 for the neutral tone. For example, “shénme” would be written as “shen2me5”.

· Use “v” for the umlauted “ü”, as in “nv3er2” for “nǚ’ér”.

· Spaces between syllables do not affect spelling accuracy.

Grading

Remember, your participation in each training session won't be counted, if you don't complete all the items and use the tutor for the required time! Please do not enter random symbols as the Pinyin spelling. Such responses will be regarded as invalid answers and the corresponding training session will be marked as incomplete.

Help

If you encounter any technical difficulties, please feel free to contact Yanhui Zhang at yanhuiz@andrew.cmu.edu, or John Kowalski at jkau@andrew.cmu.edu.