Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics, which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds, like the amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, or other properties of its frequency spectrum. Learning the acoustic phonetics would be helpful to teachers and learners of a language.

Mandarin tone is visible by using Praat for acoustic analysis. Mandarin teachers and learners can visualize Mandarin tones to evaluate one’s pronunciation and improve pronunciation with help of such objective reference.

Praat manual for beginners

We developed a Praat manual for beginners as a guidance to perform simple acoustic analysis on vowels, consonants, and prosody. Here in this website, we highlight the analysis of tone to facilitate your Mandarin tone pronunciation learning. You can also visit the full manual if you are interested in other properties.

Mandarin tone training by Praat – Materials

Mandarin tone is visible by using Praat for acoustic analysis. Mandarin teachers and learners can visualize Mandarin tones to evaluate one’s pronunciation and improve pronunciation with help of such objective reference. Teachers are encouraged to integrate such approach into their teaching. Here are the materials used for a Mandarin tone training program with five workshop sessions for your reference.

Hands-on Mandarin tone acoustic analysis practice

Here, we provide a step-by-step demonstration of acoustic analysis of Mandarin tone produced by native speakers and learners, analyzing your own reading, and therefore practicing your Mandarin tone pronunciation. You can download audio recordings of native speakers and learners’ reading retrieved from our corpus. These recordings  are already cut for your ease of use.

Please feel free to access more authentic speech data from our Mandarin spoken corpus to perform acoustic analysis of tones. [corpus link]

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