Which languages does TonePerfect support?
TonePerfect scores pronunciation in 8 languages: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Japanese and Korean.
Last checked
All eight get a score for the whole recording, for each word and for each sound inside each word. A sound is a phoneme in seven of them and a mora in Japanese. Mandarin also gets a tone score for every syllable. In Mandarin and English the app also names your chronically weak sounds; in the other six it shows and ranks your per-sound scores.
Your recording is scored against the language you are learning, not against English, so the courses work whatever your first language is. The website is in English, Spanish, French, Russian, German and Vietnamese, and its main pages, tests and pricing are also in Japanese, Korean and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
What is specific to each language
- Mandarin Chinese: the tone of every syllable is scored separately from its initial and final, with tone sandhi and the neutral tone included.
- English: every phoneme of every word, and the sounds that stay weak for you are named.
- Spanish: every phoneme, aligned back to the spelling, so you see which letters produced which sound.
- French: obligatory liaison is scored as part of the word, so a dropped liaison shows up as a wrong sound.
- German: every phoneme of a compound, however long it gets.
- Russian: every sound, including the reduced vowels of unstressed syllables.
- Japanese: mora by mora, so a long vowel cut short, a dropped small っ or a rushed beat shows up as a wrong sound.
- Korean: jamo by jamo against the sounds Korean actually makes, so 옷이 is judged as [오시].
What it does not do
- Japanese pitch accent is not scored, and no score reflects it.
- Cantonese is not one of the eight languages.