Something that I have always found really annoying about skritter is the problem I am having with 4th vs 5th tone.

What I mean by this is that things that I am used to hearing and saying as fourth tone recordes as fifth tone in skritter. Initially I thought it was just me, but now that my australian born taiwanese wife is starting using skritter to brush up her writing skills, she is having all of the exact same problem as me.

This makes me wonder if anyone else has this problem?

Taiwanese more often pronounce the end tones, unlike those from the mainland.

It's not just 4th tones being off, it's a whole load of final character tones.

From the other side of the fence, it's difficult to know when it should be a neutral tone. Where the word has a sound clip, I just listen to that and put whatever Skritter asks for and mark it correct.

In terms of learning, I'd say it'll come naturally with enough speech anyway.

Yes, despite all the trouble I have with 2nd/3rd tones, I am finding it becoming more and more natural.

I am finding now that sometimes I write the wrong tone into skritter -- even though if I were to have spoken the word I would have spoken it with the correct tone.

Hmm, better way to say that would be, if i just speak it the right tone comes out but if I try to think about it/write it is often wrong (:

Taiwanese vs. mainland neutral tones are a pain. Many of the words that are this way allow you to put the full tone for the character Skritter says is neutral without marking it wrong. If you find a word that should be on there that isn't, you can submit a comment and I'll see if I can add it.

Would you prefer speaking the tones to Skritter to input them (along with seeing a tone contour of what you said) instead of writing/typing them?

Speaking?　So for 我 instead of typing 3 or drawing ｖ you would just say wǒ into a microphone? That would be seriously amazing (as an option of course; if I'm skrittering at a cafe or something I wouldn't want to be forced to have a conversation with my computer).

I have to admit I'm skeptical how well that sort of technology would work though. I've never had good experiences with speech recognition, in any language.

If - and only if you could get it working very well, I would love to see it work like this:

New word appears [pinyin hidden]
You speak the word correctly [pinyin and tones unhide]*
You write the character.

However, I'm kind of skeptical that voice recognition would be good enough for this. Even Rosetta Stone which is aimed at this sort of thing didn't work well.

It would be very difficult to have it recognize actual syllables or do this in a noisy room. But just recognizing which tone you said, with good input quality? I wasn't a math major for nothing!

(That is speak the entire word, not just an individual character. How often do you speak individual characters?)

Ah, if it's just for the tones and nothing else, then no - may as well just flick the pen.

I thought you did Chinese?

I was also an East Asian Studies major, yes.

It's a neat idea, but ultimately I am not sure it would be worth all the effort, although I am sure you would have fun programming it! (:

> Taiwanese more often pronounce the end tones, unlike those from the mainland.

Taiwanese are also converting sh sound to s, and ch to c and so on.
before skrittering, i learned many words just by hearing, and then later I was very suprised, that 生氣 uses in fact 生, as it completely sounds here as sen chi, and not shen chi. On question, why you do not use sh sound, I got an answer, that it's faster, and "we are lazy, to make up tongue for that". same for 誰 completely transformed to "sei" etc.
4-5 tones is minor problem considering this aspect.

Yah Rolands, that is the nightmare of Mandarin. Those tonal differences compound the problem, though.

I know the world says it is one language, but I have started personally viewing Mandarin as a school of languages. You have mainland formal, southern variations of mainland formal, and Taiwanese. Jumping from one to the other is a pain. If I am in 合尔宾 or 大连 I understand the vast majority of words out of their mouths in common conversation. A 北京er is relatively easy to understand, but they do tend to speak rather rough at times, sometimes dropping the middle sylable or throwing in a freaky 儿 (I use many of the optional 儿s and all of the mandatory ones for mainland Chinese and have a northern accent, but they use some REALLY strange ones in this town. 鸡腿儿 anyone?服员儿呢？). I can understand the southern mainlanders, but I need to really work at it and have a context. Taiwaners are similar to southerners in that sense, but even slightly harder. I always equate it with being from the USA but trying to speak to someone with a hard southern Scottish ascent. I can understand, but it is difficult.