Are there any besides Rosetta Stone and Wenlin? I need something that’ll help fix my busted up tones…
I’m afraid technology won’t help you much with that. You need feedback from a live person. Or, you can record yourself and play it back, comparing it to the lesson. But, that way doesn’t help you if you are “tone deaf”. There are some people who are, and there’s not much one can do about that.
While this won’t help with your prononciation, it will help with picking up vocabulary of Chinese or any other language.
LiveDictionary is a plugin/input manager for OS X that allows you to mouse over words and will give you a popup window with definitions. It can use a few different dictionary formats which are available for many lanaguages. It works with Safari and unofficially you can get it work with many Cocoa apps like Mail or TextEdit.
So in Safari, I can just move my mouse cursor over a word and it will give me it’s definition or translation. It’s been extremely helpful in my learning of German and I’m starting to use it for Chinese.
mikeash.com/software/livedictionary/
Gary
Badass! Thanks Gary.