Hello all,
We are doing a research on the tone production of foreign learners
of Chinese, and need several volunteers to helps us out.
We have made a list of Chinese sounds and now we are looking for
subjects to read through the list and record it.
If you are a foreigner who is learning (or has been learning, or can speak)
Chinese, we will sincerely appreciate it if you can do us a favour.
The procedure is simple: read the list and record it, and then send to
our e-mail.
The list has been transcribed with both pinyin and bo-po-mo-fo, and
are avalable at the following links:
pinyin version
bopomofo version
Our e-mail address: ozclement@yahoo.com.tw
Thank you!
And you don’t want any information about the foreigners reading the list, like:
native language
time studying Chinese
where student has studied Chinese
time living in Chinese-speaking environment
other languages spoken
other languages studied
etc. etc. etc…???
In short, what is this study going to prove, if you have only random files of unknown foreigners reading a list of words? Have you considered the difference between reading a list of words (which might be unknown to the reader) and producing words in speech? Difference between connected speech and reading a list? etc. etc.
Just saying. I have no problem recording the list for you, but I’d be interested to know if the time is really going to a valid study or not.
So this is not about farting and belching.
Just wanted to rent my Taiwan family to ya. Nevermind.
There are two errors in your pinyin list: you have xuei3 and yian4, but these syllables don’t exist. I believe you mean xue3 (snow) and perhaps yan4 (?). Note also that in le4 se4, you should not include the umlauts (two dots).
I too would like to know more about the purpose of the research. Are you merely gathering descriptive data about which tones foreigners tend to get wrong, in isolation and/or in combination?
Finally, you seem to assume everyone’s computer has a microphone and recording software. Mine might or might not have this feature – I’ve simply never tried, and am a bit too busy now to try it. You might get a higher response rate if you provide a phone number to call, and record this over the phone. If you provided this, I would be happy to call and participate.
Best of luck with this, BTW! 
I ask because grad students in Taiwan are often told to “go do research” and not taught the first thing about how to design a research project so that the results mean anything.
Dragonbones’ points about ease of recording and the errors in the Pinyin are also worth noting, of course.
