Plans for adding more native speaker mandarin audio?

[Thomas Karlsson]

I'm a fairly new user of Pleco, and I already can't imagine myself studying Chinese without it.

The flashcard system is absolutely brilliant and the handwriting recognition is the best I have seen. I wish I had a tool like this when I started learning Chinese a long time ago.

I also absolutely love being able to listen to how native speakers pronounce words and expressions, as it helps me work on the area that I have been struggling with the most: tones. I like the recordings so much (especially the male voice which I think is more consistent and natural sounding), that I find myself being annoyed when I come across a word or expression that hasn't been recorded this way.

Are there any plans on recording more entries for mandarin Chinese, and/or fixing the broken female voice recordings?

 

[mikelove]

Thank you very much!

The status of our recorded audio add-ons had been up in the air somewhat when we started offering text-to-speech systems, which at least for phrases / example sentences are unambiguously better than piecing together recordings, but there's been enough positive feedback about them post-TTS that we do indeed plan to keep developing them, with more male recordings (from a different speaker, sadly) and probably a wholesale replacement of our current female recordings.

No clear timeline on that at the moment, though, it actually involves some coding since we haven't found a good up-to-date program for collecting lots of little recordings and hence need to roll our own - hiring pleasant-voiced native speakers is a lot easier than hiring programmers

 

[Thomas Karlsson]

Thanks for the speedy reply and good news to boot!

I thank you all for your hard work, coming from the era where the only way to learn Chinese was through deciphering text using book dictionaries, I feel that the price of the full version of pleco is an absolute steal!

 

[mikelove]

You're very welcome! Thanks for your business.