Free Cantonese pronunciation practice, pitch-matched to you
Cantonese is often cited as having six tones (some analyses count nine, splitting the three checked tones separately) — nearly half again as many contrasts as Mandarin, packed into a language with far fewer beginner-friendly tools built for tone specifically. Polly gives you a free way to hear any sentence at your own pitch, not a fixed reference register, and to get scored on your attempt.
Six tones, and almost nothing built for them
Most general language apps treat Cantonese as an afterthought to Mandarin, if they cover it at all — vocabulary and grammar first, tone accuracy rarely scored at all. That’s a real gap: getting a tone wrong in Cantonese doesn’t just sound foreign, it frequently produces an entirely different word, the same way it does in Mandarin.
The other gap is register. A single fixed reference voice — which is what most dictionaries and phrasebook audio give you — forces every learner to transpose tone contours into their own pitch by ear before they can even attempt one. Polly resamples the reference voice into your measured pitch instead, so the contour you hear is already the one you’re meant to produce.
How the free practice works
Record one calibration sentence to set your pitch, then pick any everyday scenario — ordering food, asking directions, introducing yourself — and hear it spoken back to you in your own register, with jyutping romanization and tone numbers under the target text so you can see what you’re listening for, not just guess at it.
Then say it back. Speech recognition transcribes your attempt and a model scores accuracy per word, calling out tone-specific mistakes rather than a single vague overall grade — the free tier covers a handful of lessons with no account required, so you can hear the difference before deciding it’s worth signing in for more.