Mandotone

Practice your Mandarin pronunciation. You say a word or sentence, and Mandotone tells you how close your tones and sounds are to native speakers.

It scores you against real human recordings (not a synthetic voice), works fully offline on your own computer, and gives feedback per syllable — so you can see exactly which tone or sound to fix.

What you get

• A tone score (are your rising/falling/dipping tones right?)
• A pronunciation score for the individual sounds (initials and finals)
• An overall grade: Good, Keep practicing, or Fail
• Plain-language notes, e.g. "expected T2 rising, you produced T1 high-level"
• Optional pitch-contour pictures comparing you to the reference

Mandotone understands tone changes (sandhi) automatically. For example, two third tones in a row shift: ni3 hao3 (written nǐ hǎo) is actually said ní hǎo, and Mandotone scores you against how it's really pronounced.

Basic usage

Score a single word (record 3 seconds from your microphone):

mandotone score-word --pinyin ni3hao3 --record 3

Score a word from an existing audio file instead:

mandotone score-word --pinyin ma1 --wav myrecording.wav

Score a full sentence (give the Chinese characters too):

mandotone score-sentence --pinyin "wo3 hen3 hao3" --hanzi "我很好" --record 4

See which reference recording a syllable uses:

mandotone ref lookup --pinyin ma1

Handy options: --plot OUT/ saves contour pictures, --json prints machine-readable results, --no-segmental scores tones only (faster).

If a recording is unclear, Mandotone says so and asks you to try again — it never makes up a score.

Setup

Installation and setup instructions are in docs/INSTALL.md.

Upstream

Reference audio is from the audio-cmn project (CC-BY-SA); Mandotone credits the speakers in every report.

License

GPLv3 or any later version. See LICENSE.md.

Copyright © 2026 Jeff Moe