Practicing Mandarin pronunciation with speech-to-text

Post date: 2021-03-06 22:47:35

I'm learning Mandarin, and I'm trying to practice pronunciation, so that I don't need to think hard in order to read pinyin and say the correct sounds. I've been practicing a little using speech-to-text software. Is this a reasonable idea? Are there downsides I'm not aware of? What's the best speech-to-text software for this?

Clearly this shouldn't be the only way I practice (I'm planning to spend time with a tutor who can help as well), but I'm wondering if it's a reasonable part of practicing, at least at first. I've tried it a bit, and it seems quite effective — I can take a word that I'm unable to pronounce in a way that the speech-to-text understands it, practice for a little while, and at the end, pronounce it in a way that the speech-to-text understands it correctly. I'm doing this with the Pleco voice search, which uses the Google/Android "cmn (Traditional Han, Taiwan)" speech-to-text system. Since it's inputting into Pleco, it shows me the pinyin, which means I don't have to worry about homophones. I like that this lets me practice pronunciation with nearly-instantaneous feedback for a little bit whenever I feel like it, rather than only in large prescheduled blocks with a native speaker, but I'm worried there may be a downside that I don't understand (since I've never seen this technique recommended anywhere). Specific things I'm worried about:

Will this give me a weird accent? I don't care much about getting the "standard" newscaster accent, but I do want to be easily understandable, so people don't have to think hard to understand me.

Are there ways in which speech-to-text is idiosyncratic such that most humans would think I'm saying one thing, but the speech-to-text would think another?

Is there anything else I don't understand about this? Why isn't this more generally recommended to people without easy access to native speakers?

Are any of these a problem? Also, what is the best speech-to-text system for this? I've used the Google one, and a friend recommended the WeChat one, are there any others I should check out?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from fluent/native speakers who have used speech-to-text software at least a little bit.

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