Mǎ or Mà Help Forum

I apologize to anyone who has noticed a day missing from their stats, specifically yesterday September 18. I had made some changes the day before and due to a mistake in one of the procedures I altered there were some crazy values recorded for the following day. Having fixed the bug which caused the...

I am uploading some updates to the website today, apologies in advance for any disruption this may cause.

I think I have been able to figure out what was going wrong, and I think I have been able to fix it. I can't really say that 100% though because my own time zone is very close to UTC which makes it a bit difficult to tell. It is also possible that I missed somewhere the fix should have been applied,...

Hi Youda, thanks for the feedback. Yes, that definitely sounds like a bug. My reasoning for the three a.m. thing was that there might well be people burning the midnight oil and studying past midnight, and it would be confusing if the statistics suddenly got reset while they were still at it. I sett...

I have made a few minor updates to the tone tests. On the reinforcement questions some text appears to remind you of which tone pairs you are trying to tell apart. Also I fixed the page to always show a vertical scroll bar. This is because I noticed that on some screen resolutions when showing the a...

Thanks for the feedback! I think that is a very good suggestion. I did originally plan to try and tackle other problem sounds as well but somehow that got lost along the way in the development process. I could certainly think about including something like that in a future upgrade to the website.

I have just uploaded a new version of the website which contains a small, but I think very important difference. Up until now progress was based on the time you spent testing, and the feedback to the user was based on the shade of green on the indicator next to the timer. There was no clear way of k...

I have asked my web hosting company to configure the website so it is a secure connection, but unfortunately they are not only taking a long time to do it, they seem to have messed up various other parts of the configuration while they are at it. At the moment it gives a 404 error if there are any c...

A couple of times recently people have written to me about tone pairs on the site that sound identical, to such an extent that they wanted confirmation that the sounds really represent different tones. The latest example is yan3 se4 https://www.charactermine.com/misc/yan3 se4.wav and yan2 se4 https:...

My experience of learning tones is that the process is maddeningly slow and difficult compared to say learning vocabulary or learning characters. This may not be everyone’s experience. In the “boot camp” page I assert that learning tones has nothing to do with music or musicality. My reasoning is th...