I wrote in this thread about my Anki deck for practicing Mandarin pronunciation.

 

To clarify what Anki is. It is a spaced repetition software that you can create decks of flashcards with any information you like and the software will show them to you at increasing intervals so that you will learn the material in the most efficient way possible, spending more time with the cards that are hard for you and less with the ones that are easy for you. You just need to study your review and new cards with Anki daily and let the software take care of scheduling. There are also other applications out there but I'm familiar with Anki and it is quite widely used.

I have found online great pinyin tables with audio, but not a Spaced Repetition Deck like this, so I ended up making one for myself. The deck has cards for from pinyin to native sound and anatomical pictures showing the correct mouth and tongue positions, and from the sound to pinyin with the learner required to type the correct pinyin and tone. I have now realized that this deck would probably be of great value for other learners too and I would like to share it. The problem however is that the audio files and the pictures are from sources that can claim immaterial property rights if it was distributed.

 

I would therefore like to recreate the deck, license it under MIT license and distribute it for everyone with the terms basically being that anyone can do anything with it without any warranty but they just have to include the original authors' names in any derived product.

 

For this I would need native Chinese teachers' help creating the recordings and someone with artistic ability to create nice pictures. I could create the pictures too, but they wouldn't look nice...

 

I would prefer the deck to have at least two recordings for each syllable in standard Mandarin from different people. Preferably both male and female voices, but the minimum viable product would have at least one recording for each syllable and multiple recordings from different people for the similar sounding syllables.

 

There are 1283 unique syllables in mandarin so if it took a teacher 5 - 6 seconds to create each recording, it would take a little over two hours to record the whole set. Each sound would need to be in their separate mp3 files and named after an agreed naming convention. I could then create the deck and send it back to the teachers to check and after that we would publish it here and in Anki Web.

 

There would be no monetary compensation for the work, but the teachers could use the deck to promote their classes and use it in their teaching. The teachers' names would also be included in the license copyright text.

We could also do this for Cantonese too.

 

Is this something that other learners and teachers would be interested in?