If one was not aware that I write like three articles in quick succession, they would likely be concerned that my shoulder is still hurting.
Wiki Wednesday #268 - Hoshi Tsukine / ホシ月音
The voice provider of Hoshi is Estonian. This led me to look and see if I could find a pronunciation dictionary for Estonian to see if it would be easy peasy to make a Diffsinger phonemizer or not. I believe... There is no ready to use dictionary, but there is a functioning G2P which could be used to make the dictionary without input from a native speaker. Anyway!
Hoshi was a spaceship who crashed on Mars. She was then turned into a robot that looks like a small child.
Who is Tsukine Hoshi?
 |
| art from wiki |
I mentioned previously that I use WaniKani. It's a Japanese learning app that I got a lifetime subscription to a long, long time ago. It was my second time around with a paid app like that. The first one was IKnow.jp. I got a one that I subscription as a gift and I loved it! But they don't have lifetime memberships.
Let me start by saying that you don't need to pay for that stuff if you have grit and determination. All of IKnow's material (aside from licenced stock images) was made creative commons at one point. You can make an anki deck with all of that stuff and use it for free. You can download premade decks with all of that content. But... I just never was able to figure out how to make Anki work for me. I mean, I got the app and flashcard decks working but there was just something about the presentation that didn't click the way paid apps did. Probably because of how lessons are presented in those paid apps.
If you have the spare cash and really want to learn, then I definitely recommend trying iKnow if it hasn't changed too much since 2012.
I love WaniKani. But there's a big thing about WaniKani... It won't teach you anything other than kanji. You won't learn how to speak Japanese or grammar. I had already gotten a 3 on the AP Japanese test by the time I started WaniKani.
Don't jump into WaniKani as your first method of learning Japanese. It's like learning English off of nothing but vocabulary words. It definitely helps to know the word crimson, but how useful is that if you don't know how to say "the bowl was crimson"?
But if you already know your basic grammar? It's definitely great. I'm bad at being consistent but WaniKani helped me get from kindergarten level to third grade level. If I had been consistent, I would have already been at a high school level by now.
The problem for me definitely is motivation. I love American media. I spend all of my free time consuming American media because it's what I like. American media and Japanese media are very, very different.
The only reason I have to study... Is friendship and trying to get Japanese people to record Diffsinger models for me. (And number get bigger - I need a dashboard to tell me when number gets bigger.)
So if you want to learn Japanese... Find a reason you really care about. If you don't have a reason, it just won't happen.
My reason when I was in high school was because I wanted to run away to Japan. But then I lived in Los Angeles and, boy howdy, it had everything I could ever want. Once that was out of my system, I really just stopped wanting that. I wanted to stay in America and maybe learn Spanish.
But now I'm back home and I don't want to leave my room! So my only motivation is friendship and vocal synths.
How is Hoshi Tsukine's bank?
Hoshi has a single CV bank. It is hiragana encoded. She has a soft and pretty voice, but the samples are very soft and it feels like the consonants are missing sometimes. As I said about a bank I just wrote about, if you don't care about the lyrics being exact, this is a very lovely UTAU.
Where can I download Tsukine Hoshi?
You can find her on her Wiki page.
No comments:
Post a Comment