Feature request: Allow any dictionary's tones to be considered correct

[koreth]

I quiz myself on pronunciation using the pinyin input testing mode. One thing that often trips me up, given that I do most of my conversing with people from Taiwan, is that I'll enter the tones for a word only to find that whichever dictionary I happen to have used for the flashcard has putonghua pronunciation with a neutral tone in place of the explicit tone. However, there's usually at least one dictionary that doesn't use the neutral tone, and I'd love it if I could be counted as having answered correctly if my answer matches *any* of the dictionary entries' tones.

Trivial example: 喜歡 is xi3huan5 in ABC, PLC, TL, and CC. But in Taiwan (and a lot of parts of the mainland, for that matter) they pronounce it xi3huan1, and this pronunciation is reflected in the ADS dictionary.

 

[mikelove]

Adding support for Taiwan variant pronunciation makes a lot of sense - our next big pronunciation project after Cantonese, probably - but this particular solution seems like the wrong way to handle it; there'll be lots of cases where no dictionary offers that pronunciation, or where a specific dictionary offers the wrong pronunciation, or where a particular string of characters has multiple pronunciations with different meanings (especially troublesome with single characters); it might happen to help in the particular case of 喜歡, but it's inconsistent and in a lot of places may actually make things worse.

So I'm not wild about your proposed fix, but the problem is certainly a legitimate one and something we need to work on.

 

[koreth]

Of course I'd love Taiwan pronunciation support as a full-on feature. I figured this would be a couple orders of magnitude less work since it's a code change rather than adding new information to dictionaries, so I suggested it instead. If you're going to do it the more comprehensive way, that'd be even better. For what it's worth, and maybe it's just the random chance of the particular words I'm learning, I've found that all, or perhaps nearly all, the neutral-tone words that trip me up have tone marks in at least one of the dictionaries (usually Adsotrans but sometimes others too).

While I'm here about tones in flashcards, it might also be nice to be able to use pronunciation answers that include tone sandhi, e.g., 不屑 is pronounced bu2xie4 but I have to write bu4xie4 or it'll be marked wrong. This creates a kind of cognitive dissonance where I'm sounding the word out one way in my head and writing it another way, whereas in non-sandhi cases the writing and the voicing reinforce one another. On the other hand, some people would probably hate that idea on the theory that it will lead to forgetting the tones of the individual characters.

 

[mikelove]

It just kind of feels like an ugly hack - might serve in this case, but wouldn't work in every case, and could even make things worse in some. And it's tricky enough to code that we can't really justify doing it as an off-by-default option.

Tone sandhi in fill-in-the-blanks answers are something we've gone back and forth about - still haven't decided what to do with that one yet.