# 9M Mandarin tone speech model

14 Hacker News commenters recommended 9M Mandarin tone speech model and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Praised for specific feedback on which tones were off and for running in-browser at 11MB; the main caveat is misreading some speech, especially fast or casual talk.

## Why people recommend it

- Specific feedback on tones that are off (2 comments): "I already feel way more confident based on its feedback" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832506)) "it did a good job of identifying which tones were off" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832424))
- Helpful for learning Mandarin tones (2 comments): "This is amazing, if you feel like opening an entire language to being learned more easily" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832342)) "Neat. A personal tone trainer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832972))

## What people warn about

- Misreads fast or casual speech (2 comments): "I found that it loses track of the phonemes when speaking quickly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832680)) "The model thinks I was making mistakes when I speak casually" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46833316))
- Doesn't handle tone transformation (2 comments): "I don't think it takes care of tone transformation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46833345)) "The tool definitely needs to address tone transformations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46833498))
- Flags correct speech as wrong (3 comments): "it couldn't properly recognize a very clearly pronounced "吃" and instead heard some shi2" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46835000)) "the recognizer was flagging some of my utterances incorrectly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46833688)) "For me it doesn't work very well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46834840))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Duolingo](https://hackerapproved.com/p/duolingo.md): 39 recommend
- [Language Transfer](https://hackerapproved.com/p/language-transfer.md): 13 recommend
- [Pimsleur](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pimsleur.md): 9 recommend
- [Voxel Tokyo](https://hackerapproved.com/p/voxel-tokyo.md): 9 recommend
- [italki](https://hackerapproved.com/p/italki.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "9M Mandarin tone speech model", https://hackerapproved.com/p/9m-speech-model-for-mandarin-tones/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).