Monday Apr 1st Simplified Curriculum Update

Breaking changes

  • 综 sum up pinyin change: zong4 → zong1. This is the standard Mainland pronunciation. This character will be reset for all that have learned it.

Components

Updated

  • tree alternate names: trees

  • horn mnemonic change

Characters

Updated

Newly added

Words

Updated

Newly added

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QQ: Did the text-to-speech voice change slightly for some of the newer words? It sounds slightly lower in pitch. Also 失望 - Disappointed - Simplified Chinese word mnemonic | HanziHero sounds strange for a word said in isolation, the shi1 is heavily reduced.

Also related, what’s the plan if any for native speaker voice samples?

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In terms of voice changes, we haven’t changed our TTS parameters, it may be that the service provider changed some things on their end.

Thanks for the report for 失望! There was an interesting edge case in how we generated the zhuyin we provided the TTS service (we provided ㄕㄨㄤˋ (shuang4) but needed to provide ㄕ ㄨㄤˋ (shi1wang4) [note the space]). This is now fixed.

Native voices we don’t have any immediate plans for, but is something we want to get to eventually. When we do add them, we will probably start with just the sounds and character pronunciations before expanding to word pronunciations (if at all). Mainly because the former is a well-defined finite set that we can contract out once, while words will grow unbounded indefinitely.

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