The upsurge in the craze for learning Chinese has engulfed the world in recent years. On June 13th President Si-chen Li of NTU announced that Department of Electrical Engineering Professor Dr. Lin-shan Lee and his research team had successfully developed an "NTU Chinese" online learning software, whose instant acoustic recognition capability, coupled with multidimensional structure of communication materials, was expected to greatly enhance the efficiency of Chinese language study, leading the world with advanced speech diagnostic technology.

The core technology of "NTU Chinese" adopts the Chinese language voice signal processing and analysis techniques that were developed by Dr. Lin- Shan Lee and his research team over the years, allowing the teachers to comprehensively evaluate the correctness of the learner's enunciation from their pronunciations, tones (four tones), rhythms, and diphthongs. It also enables the teachers to precisely analyze the biases in every character and every sound (including consonants, vowels, and intonation), thus providing learners with on-line instant diagnosis and correction. And at the end of each learning phase, this software is able to induce a "diagnosis of learning records", providing the learners with directions for improvement. In essence, "NTU Chinese" is capable of providing complete instant, two-way interactivity between the computer and the learner as if a real person is teaching the course.Such functions are not found in any existing Chinese teaching software.

"NTU Chinese" is now open to learners for trial till the end of September. Its website is: http://chinese.ntu.edu.tw. In the future, NTU welcomes outside participation to help promote this remarkable software, including assistance in the design of better teaching materials, opening up more Chinese language courses, and promoting "NTU Chinese" to places all over the world.