Anki - text to speech

I use Anki for our memory work. Or rather, I was using Anki, but we've been taking a break over the summer. Anki is still very much in development mode as it gets updated fairly frequently. I stopped updating as soon as a new release was out after getting burned with a couple of releases that introduced minor but very annoying releases. Then on a whim, I looked at the release notes for the latest release and found that a few releases back they had a new feature that I'd been wanting for a long time: text-to-speech for Chinese. I immediately upgraded.

As text-to-speech engines run, it's pretty bare-bones. It has a library about a thousand sound files representing all the syllables and tones in Mandarin Chinese. Then it finds the pinyin for each character and the corresponding sound file. You'd never mistake it for natural speech, but it's free and actually a fairly common way of automatically generating text-to-speech for Chinese.

So, now I'm in the process of adding audio to Sparkle's and my Chinese decks. This is just the breakthrough that I was hoping for when I was wondering what to do with Sparkle's Chinese studies. It's not nearly as good as a real live teacher, but a live teacher for her isn't doable for our family at this time. As long as I keep up my studies and stay ahead of her vocabulary and grammar wise, I think that we can limp along in learning Chinese for a while yet.