Here’s the funny part: their American accent totally made it believable.
It’s very clear that even with the AI generated voice, they are not native Mandarin speakers. They sound like your typical foreigners who learned Chinese for a number of years lol. I don’t know if it’s the dataset they’re trained on or just how the algorithm works, but it’s very interesting.
Makes me think about what it would be like if Chinese ever becomes an international language, in the way English has and Latin did before it. It makes me giggle to think about Mandarin with a backwoods Tennessee drawl.
Even with the phonemes of any two given language varieties that are considered to be “the same sound”, there are going to be differences in what the average pronunciation is, so I assume that’s a lot of what’s going on here. The other thing is that English and Chinese have a lot of phonemes that barely or don’t at all overlap in possible pronunciations, so the algorithm is picking the closest match.
Here’s the funny part: their American accent totally made it believable.
It’s very clear that even with the AI generated voice, they are not native Mandarin speakers. They sound like your typical foreigners who learned Chinese for a number of years lol. I don’t know if it’s the dataset they’re trained on or just how the algorithm works, but it’s very interesting.
Makes me think about what it would be like if Chinese ever becomes an international language, in the way English has and Latin did before it. It makes me giggle to think about Mandarin with a backwoods Tennessee drawl.
The best comparison for me is Montreal french. Deadass sounds like your uncle from up north getting a little parlez vous on.
Sure, they pronounce their Rs, but I don't see anything much silly with Montreal french...
Even with the phonemes of any two given language varieties that are considered to be “the same sound”, there are going to be differences in what the average pronunciation is, so I assume that’s a lot of what’s going on here. The other thing is that English and Chinese have a lot of phonemes that barely or don’t at all overlap in possible pronunciations, so the algorithm is picking the closest match.