TDG – CantoSounds: Online Cantonese Pronunciation Learning Platform: A Gamification Approach

Abstract

Pronunciation has been reported as one of the greatest barriers to learning Cantonese. Although the first two weeks in undergraduate Cantonese courses (CHIN9511 and CHIN9512) are dedicated to the teaching of pronunciation and romanisation, students always feel that they need more practice and learning support. Since students of these courses are from diverse backgrounds, it is impossible to conduct sound drills to cater for all students’ need with a class-size of 20. The traditional ‘listening to the CD’ method does not work well either, because of the lack of interactive multimedia and feedback.

In view of this, we have developed CantoSounds, a web-based and smartphone interactive learning platform that provides audio recordings and video courses in English, Mandarin, Hindi, Nepali and Korean to supplement lectures and textbooks. The platform also makes use of gamification strategies to help students improve their Cantonese pronunciation, compare and contrast easily confused sounds according to their linguistic backgrounds, provide additional drills for harder sounds, and keep track of their progress for teachers’ reference. 

Deliverables