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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>A local Mandarin speaker made a comment yesterday that really got the wheels spinning. The topic was the tonal aspect of Chinese languages. She commented that the tonal aspects to pronunciation makes Chinese easier to understand in some ways than English, because the pitch and transition conveys meaning about the word, helping differentiate it from other similar sounding words. Then a thought occurred to me. We can do real-time Fourier analyses, so a computer hearing Chinese speech could pick up the tonal inflection perhaps better than the untrained western ear. For that reason, I can imagine Chinese speech recognition and synthesis might in some ways be easier than English.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Do we have any Chinese speech recognition hipsters who could comment?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>There is a reason why I am asking: I want to teach my son a language, but I think Mandarin would require too much time and effort investment when it is easy to imagine in ten years a computer could do it better than humans can anyway.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>spike<o:p></o:p></p></div></body></html>