[DigitalTurk]

Speaking of apps for helping you learn Chinese.

I don't know how difficult it would be to create something like this, but an app that could help with mastering tones would be very useful to me.

I'd buy such an app even if it was very simple. Like if it had a start and stop button and would graph the tone of what you said in between.

But, yeah, I don't know if it's feasible to create.

[gbraad]

Some applications exist to help you recognizing tones based on the pinyin, but you want a comparison between the model and your voice? Thought Rosetta did this..

[DigitalTurk]

I can't seem to find this app.

What I want is a graphical representation of the tone of my voice (over time).

I've been told that my voice is monotone when I speak Western languages so I don't really have a good feel for what I need to do to speak in a high or low tone. If I had a graphical representation of what I was in fact doing then I think I could gain control over the tone of my voice more easily.

I guess the obvious alternative is to record and play back my own voice.

[gbraad]

Look at a demo of Rosetta Stone. Haven't touched it recently, but it should be able to do most of what you want.

[alan_h]

I think Rosettastone may have feature. From what I understand voice-recognition for Mandarin is a hard problem.

[Bankq]

Perhaps surprisingly, it's kinda easier than for English because standard Mandarin is born separated clearly by characters and have only 4 tones (tone for certain character in sentence may change but always within those 4 tones). However as for speaking language in reality (e.g dialects), it's hard (I won't say it's harder than any other languages since I don't have any experience working on it).