Cantonese High Falling Tone Support

[talimedicatus]

Hey,

I am very interested in your update that will bring Cantonese support for flashcards. I just wanted to say that hopefully you guys will allow for an extra empty tone box (maybe for which we can select a color ourselves) to accommodate people who study Cantonese with 7 tones and not 6. I see the current version of Pleco has 6 ready buttons when creating flashcards, so wanted to ask if you guys are planning such support. Even though in Hong Kong the high level and high falling tones have been merged, most Cantonese speakers in China and, indeed, around the world, observe this differences in phonemes. I hope Pleco will support such distinction.

Best,

Maciek

 

[mikelove]

No plans to support 7 at the moment - we certainly might consider it if we get more requests, but about the only Cantonese enhancements we've seen a significant amount of interest in so far are improved Yale romanization support (which we're already working on) and a male voice.

The flashcard format for pronunciation storage is flexible enough that if we do decide to support 7 tones at some point it won't require a major overhaul to implement, but since we're planning to stick with 6 in all of our dictionaries / audio / etc, I'm not sure how many people would use it if we added it; would have to manually add your own audio recordings, pronunciation readings, etc, at which point you're getting much less benefit out of Pleco compared to a standalone flashcard app.