Provide mp3s for syllables

[nandomartin]

Request description

As a user I still prefer using a library of recorded Chinese sounds instead of machine generated sounds. The advantage of this file format over the computer generated sounds its that the recorded sound is clear and full of nuances. In my opinion this is really important in order to learn a language as Chinese.

This library I'm mentioning is a legacy of a previous Anki plugin Pinyin Toolkit I installed years ago and consists on about 1.630 sounds in MP3 format named with the pinyin system (sound and tone number).

So for the word 例如 I need to manually fill the field 'sound' with the following data: [sound:li4.mp3][sound:ru2.mp3]
Some examples:
举手 corresponds to [sound:ju3.mp3] [sound:shou3.mp3]
中国 needs to be filled with [sound:.zhong1.mp3] [sound:guo2.mp3]

It would be great if this task could be done automatically. It would be a huge time-saving feature.
Also the option to automatically fill the field on previous cards would be really helpful.

If further descriptions of the task is needed I would be glad to help.

Thank you in advance for your help and time dedicated to this plugin, personally I think it's one of the most useful ones you can use with Anki and has an invaluable resource for thousands of students around the world.

[jdlorimer]

I'll check the licensing on those mp3s. If there's no issue there, I'm happy to add this feature.

That said, the pronunciation of multisyllabic words is not the same as the combination of the individual characters. Your example of 举手 demonstrates this most clearly, because the tones are not correct when done this way. As a word, it is not pronounced as two 3rd tones.

But actually the issue is deeper than incorrect tones; adjacent syllables affect the pronunciation in other ways as well, and TTS is better able to take this into consideration, even if the results sound a tad robotic.