(Future Impact) Invention in the Future: Forest Path: Non-dual Technologies
How a future spinoff company might market the PinYing system and what its products might look like.
Forest Path Studio fuses the ancient and modern, art and technology, poetics and engineering to merge the world’s two most-spoken languages at the level of their phonetic DNA.
While hundreds of millions of students in China study English for over ten years as part of their regular schooling, only a small fraction go on to use the language beyond the classroom. Many Chinese English learners report that this is due to anxiety over uncertainty around English pronunciation.
The Chinese Romanization System used by all students in China only applies to Mandarin Chinese, and the system itself has created additional problems for English learners in China. For instance, the Romanization system does not distinguish between the vowels in /sit/ and /seat/ or between /mug/ and /meg/, among others.
Features
Using Pinying blocks and a system of electronic chips, readers, and sounds. The Seedling would allow users to create English words using Pinying characters based on Chinese pronunciation.
The Seedling and blocks consumer-facing prototype offers a more hands-on learning tool that combines the tactile play of blocks with the sophistication of the Pinying software. The tool first pronounces the correct sound of each of the Pinying characters inserted and then pronounces the whole word spelled by the assembled characters. The home version would fold into a more transportable shape and size.
