For practice
Fly through corridors with your voice
Fly through gates shaped like tone contours. Ace the pitch, clear the gate. This builds muscle memory without you even thinking about it.
A tone-training game, not a fluency app
Tones can be hard to grasp for non-Mandarin speakers. FlappyTone lets you practice tones intuitively, while having fun!
Flappytone in action.
For practice
Fly through gates shaped like tone contours. Ace the pitch, clear the gate. This builds muscle memory without you even thinking about it.
For understanding
No gates, no score. Watch your voice trace the tone shape in real time against a native speaker's. Wait for the "aha!" moment and then go try out the game!
Needs a microphone and a quiet room. Your voice is processed on your device, never uploaded or stored.
How this works
mā, má, mǎ, mà trace four different pitch shapes every time a native speaker says them, that's literally what the tone marks are. Say a tone enough times while watching its shape and you will start recognizing it before you can explain why. You're effectively creating a visual memory of pitch, pretty cool!
mǎ — three attempts stacked on the target shape
The other half of the app
Say mǎ ten times in a row and watch every attempt stack on the target shape. No score, no pressure, no gate to clear. Helps you understand how to voice each tone properly.
Based on real speech, not the textbook
Every corridor is measured from Jane, a native Taiwanese speaker. The gate shapes therefore represent the exact path of her voice at the moment of recording. So if a shape doesn't match a textbook you've used, that's not a bug, it's a real accent. More accents, and eventually other tonal languages, are on the roadmap.
Every clip in the inventory, resampled and averaged: the bold line is the mean, the faint lines behind it are what she actually said.
Coming next
Right now it's 120 one-syllable words and four tones. Good for starters. Next: a bigger word list, tone-pair drills and eventually more accents. Get notified when new words ship.
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Next
A bigger word list
Then
Tone-pair drills
Later
More accents & languages
On mobile
iOS and Android apps aren't out yet. A native app would add offline play, practice reminders and a streak you can keep, sign up below to get notified when it's out!
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Same effect as an app icon: full screen, no URL bar eating a fifth of the display.